The Clockmaker's Boy
by Ceres Wunderkind
Summary: An old fear returns to haunt Lyra's world. Peter Joyce, Lyra and the gyptians must risk everything in their fight against the pernicious evil of the Boreal Foundation.
1. My day begins

!**_Introduction_**

This story is the fourth in a sequence which began with my previously posted story _Intentions_ and was continued in _Threads _and_ The King's Councillor_. If you've read those stories already, or you want to discover what's going on as Peter Joyce tells it, then skip this intro and go straight on to Peter's narrative.

Otherwise:

In _Intentions_, the Subtle Knife is restored and passes from Will Parry to Giancarlo Bellini, and we first meet Lyra's half-sister Elizabeth Boreal. Giancarlo takes the Knife to his home world of Cittagazze.

In _Threads_, it is ten years later. Will is a doctor, Lyra is an academic, and Elizabeth is the chairwoman of the powerful Boreal Foundation, which is trying to make a new Subtle Knife. Giancarlo Bellini and his adopted sister Guilietta return to Will's world. Elizabeth's accomplices Mr Greaves and Miss Morley try to take the Knife, but are foiled by Will and Giancarlo, aided by Mary Malone. Mr Greaves is killed and the Knife is finally destroyed.

In _The King's Councillor_ Lyra, now thirty-five and an established professor at Jordan Collge, is summoned to London, where she meets Alfred, King of Brytain. The Church, faced with Alfred's determination to reduce its power and influence, tries to kill him and Lyra, but is defeated.

Now read on!

**__**

The Tale of the Clockmaker's Boy

I woke cold and hungry. Outside the shop window, so far as I could see through the frost that had built up on the glass, condensed and frozen from my breath, the snow was still falling in large flakes, slowly spinning to earth from the sombre clouds above.

The snow had been falling when Viola and I had gone to bed last night and it looked as if it was going to keep on falling all day. I hoped that we were not going to have to run many errands today. The winter doesn't suit me – it's summer I like best, when the nights are short and the days are long and warm and brightly lit.

There was nothing to do about it, though. If you want to enjoy the gold-green afternoons of summer you've got to put up with the grey gloom of winter mornings too. I rolled off the mattress, and stood up carefully, not wanting to bang my head, still wrapped in my blanket. Viola skipped out of the way, leapt onto the stool by the wall and jumped across from it to the counter.

First things first. If the shop was to be ready for Master James by nine o'clock then there were a number of jobs to be done. By me, naturally. So, not stopping to wash or dress properly, I set to the first of my jobs; stoking up the fire in the next door kitchen. 

You see; there's an order you have to do things in. You can't wash if there's no hot water to wash in. All right, you can, but it doesn't work very well, believe me. It's a good idea to build up the fire in the kitchen range first, to heat the water. And there's no point in washing before you rake the cold ashes out of the range or go down to the cellar to fetch up a scuttle of coal. It's logical, isn't it? First you do the dirty jobs you have to do to heat the water you need to wash off the dirt that got onto you while you were doing the dirty jobs to… You get the idea, I expect.

The cellar door is outside the shop, in the yard, so I stuffed my feet into my boots without bothering to do up the laces, went into the kitchen and picked up the coal-scuttle, and unbolted the door, the top and bottom bolts grating in the hasps as I pulled them back. The snow had drifted about four inches deep against the door so I had to step up onto it as I made my way into the yard and across to the coal-cellar. Grateful that the cellar door opened inwards so I didn't have to shovel the snow away from it before I could get it open, I climbed gingerly down to the bottom of the steep brick steps, balancing the coal-scuttle on one arm. Viola skipped ahead of me and found the shovel, casually dropped on the stone floor the night before by Carrie, the maid.

I dragged the fully-loaded coal-scuttle across the yard back to the kitchen, taking the risk that the noise would wake the family and bring their wrath down upon my head.

Half an hour later, and things were humming. The kitchen was warm, the kettle was boiling, and any minute now Carrie might deign to come down from her attic room and start making breakfast. I'd gone back into the shop and rolled up my blanket and mattress, taking them from their night-time position under the shop counter where Viola and I sleep and putting them away under the stairs. I'd had a good wash and flung on my trews, shirt and pea-jacket.

'Peter!' That was Carrie, at last, treading heavily down the wooden stairs. 'Have you got my stove going, you lazy slob?'

'My dearest lady, your majesty; all is ready for your sublime graciousness.' I made my deepest, most sarcastic, mock bow, and I could guess that Viola was doing something similar behind me. Carrie swung a pudgy hand at my face, which I easily ducked, and shoved past me into the kitchen, her Adrian trotting at her heels. Taking the poker, she flicked open the cover of the range and a red flare of light flooded the kitchen, drowning out the pale dreary greyness that crept through the window. 'Master James'll have a fit when he finds out how much of his coal you've been using,' she said, and grinned.

'Tight git,' I grinned back, and we both laughed. Carrie's all right, on a good day.

You've probably guessed from reading this far what my station in life is. If you _have_ read it, that is. My mate Jim, who's at Bigsby and Jarrett two doors up, says he never reads the beginning of a story. It'll all padding, he says. The writer, he says, gives you loads of guff about the weather, or tells you what town the hero was born in and who his father and mother were and it's all, he says, because he gets paid so much per word. Yes it's true, he gets paid a penny a word and it doesn't matter if the word is a short one like _me_ or a great big long one like _disestablishmentarianism_, he still gets his penny. So writers look out of the window and write about the clouds and the snow (hah!) or they describe all the pictures in the room, or list their half-forgotten aunts and uncles, and all at a penny a word. Besides, he says, it's more fun reading the story if you work out who everyone is and what's happening as you go along without reading all the give-aways at the beginning.

Anyway Jim, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. The rest of you; all you need to know for now is that I've been apprenticed to Master James the clockmaker for the past couple of years, and that my position in the household is somewhere just above the mice that like to nibble my ears of a night as I snuggle down in my bed underneath the shop counter. You've met Viola, my squirrel-daemon, and Carrie the maid and Adrian. I'll introduce the others as they appear.

You'll also have guessed that, although this morning sounds like a typical day in the life of an apprentice, give or take a snowfall or two, I wouldn't be telling you about it in so much detail if it hadn't been a _particular_ sort of day as well. You'd be right at that, but as it's me, not you, who's writing this you're going to have to wait until I get to the part of the day that made it so particular. It's no good skipping ahead, like Jim, in the hope that you'll land on exactly the right bit. You might miss it, and then what would you do?


	2. My day's work

Carrie made toast and scrambled eggs and bacon and kaffee, loaded everything onto a tray, and took them to the family's dining room.  She left me some toast and scrambled egg of my own and poured me a cup of kaffee from the pot before she took it upstairs.  I ate in the kitchen, by the range, snug and warm, Viola stretched out along my leg.

After breakfast I was feeling much better, as you can imagine, and ready to start work.

Ah yes, work.  Let's talk about that.  I've already told you that I've been indentured to Master James for the past two years and that I have a pretty lowly position here.  You might be thinking that I'm after your sympathy– poor downtrodden boy! – but it's not like that at all.  I like it at James and James.

It works like this.  I'm apprenticed to Master James, and so I have to do lots of what you probably think is low menial work.  It's absolutely true that I have to get up before everyone else and sleep under the counter and all that.  And that I have to sweep out the shop, and use the privy in the yard and not the one in the house (they're so proud of their indoor privy) and eat what are basically the scraps from their table.  But look at it from their point of view.  They have to feed and clothe a growing boy who is, for the first year or two, totally useless.  He's more of a hindrance than a help in the shop (actually, there're two shops.  I'll come on to that.)  If a new apprentice can do as much as work the pedals on a lathe without stopping to look out of the window (and ruining a piece of work) or attend to a customer without cheeking him (and losing business for his master) then it's about as much as you can expect.  'A new apprentice is as much use as a new baby.'  That's a favourite saying of my friend Fred's master, over at Hornsby's.  'And just about as smelly,' he often adds.

If the apprenticeship works well, the master and the boy get along and slowly, day by day and step by step, the knowledge and the mystery of the master's craft pass on to his student.  Usually, it's not actual teaching – like in school – that happens.  It's more like a lamp, where the wick is dipped in the oil and slowly soaks it up.  If the wick's good, and the oil is good, and they match each other, then after a while you have a lamp you can light, and that's a useful thing and something that's worth the waiting for.

I wasn't always so philosophical about life, but people change, and so have I.  That's philosophical, too.

So, I was looking forward to the day's work.  I wasn't sure what it would bring.  Repairs, most likely.  In cold weather, steel becomes brittle, but people often don't realise this and they wind their clocks up just the same way they do in summer.  Which is too far and too fast for winter and leads to broken mainsprings.  We've reached the point, Master James and me, where he'll let me let me dismantle the simpler, cheaper, clocks.  He can trust me to box and label the parts, and take care not to damage the screws as I take them out, or to scatter everything on the floor when I separate the two halves of the movement.  He's even let me put a movement back together once or twice, while he watches, that is.

'Good morning, Master.'

'Good morning, Peter.'

There you are.  Not every master would talk like that to his apprentice.  Civilly, I mean.  I suppose it's because his craft is what you might call refined, which sounds snobbish.  But it's true that he works with fine quality clocks, and he deals with people who have money to spend and who expect to be treated respectfully.  It's like he treats everything and everybody the same – with care and, that word again, respect.  I'm lucky to have him as a master.

I rolled up the blinds at the front of the shop, unlocked the door, and turned the hanging sign around so it said CLOSED.  Which means that it said OPEN on the street side – ha-ha.  I said back there that there were two shops on Master James' premises.  This was the part that the customers thought of when they considered visiting James and James, Fine Clocks And Instruments, Shoe Lane, Oxford.  I didn't spend very much time in the front shop.  For a start I didn't like the shop assistant, Elias Cholmondley ('Mr Cholmondley to you, boy') and he, smartly dressed in black suit, wing collar and blue tie, didn't like me.  We both knew that in ten year's time, if it all went to plan, I would be a proper clockmaker and he would still be just a shop assistant.

No, for me the place that mattered was the workshop, at the back, and I think that was true of Master James as well.  If you've got lots of money and you can afford to go out to posh restaurants you've probably seen some diner, wanting to show off his taste and influence to the other people in the place, summon the chef from the kitchen so that he can congratulate him on the excellence of his dishes.  I've never been sure why the chef doesn't bring his biggest, heaviest, skillet with him and crack the man (it's always a man) over the head with it for his presumption.  Something to do with the law, I expect.

So, anyway, when Master James talked about the "shop", it was the workshop he meant, with its wooden floor, benches, tools and furnace, not the shop, which is all red carpet, mahogany cabinets and artful anbaric lighting.

That morning, Master James set me to work on the new long-case clock he was making for the Mayor's parlour.  You'll have realised that there are a lot of skills you need to make a fine clock, and that clocks come in many different sizes, from overgrown pocket-watches to the sort of monster that you see on grand buildings, like the Great Parliament in London.  Woodwork is one of them, and doing it had the advantage that I could rub down and varnish the case for the Mayor's new clock and not get in the Master's way while he did the intricate work on the movement.  We were both glad to be safely out of the cold – me especially.  I might have ended up working for a farrier, or in the Sunderland shipyards, in all weathers.  I'll tell you later how it was that I came to be living and working in Oxford.

At midday, we knocked off.  Master James cast an eye over the case that I had been working on, pointed out a few places that I'd missed ('Peter, the back of this clock will never be seen when it's standing against the wall in the Mayor's parlour.  If it's not as well made as the front, the Mayor will likely not know anything about it.  But I'll know, and you'll know too.'), and told me to put it aside to dry.  I could carry on with it in the afternoon.

Master James went upstairs for his lunch with his wife.  Their daughter Emily was at school and I hardly ever saw her.  I wrapped my muffler round my neck, slipped out of the kitchen door, crossed the yard and through the back gate to the alley beyond and from there into Shoe Lane, avoiding passing through the front shop and the snooty Mr Cholmondley.

The Talbot Inn is just off Shoe Lane, in the angle between it and the road behind it, which runs next to the High.  The back room is very popular with us apprentices and so long as we don't make a row and annoy the gentlemen in the saloon bar at the front the landlord, old Jenkins, is happy to take our pennies in exchange for pie, chips and beer (which I'm sure he waters down, by secret arrangement with our masters, many of whom must have patronised his premises when they were our age and know what we'd get up to if we weren't kept under a fatherly eye, so to speak.)

Fred and Jim were there already, and they'd saved me a place by the fire.  I stomped in, doing the puffing, blowing and rubbing my hands together bit, and sat down on the bench next to them.  We ate our steak-and-kidney pie and boiled potatoes and drank our suspiciously thin ale and chaffed each other, and moaned about our masters and speculated, idly of course, about our prospects with Sarah, the prettiest of the seamstresses at Maison Jeanette, at the High Road end of Shoe Lane.  Viola looked disgusted.

We must have let our fancies regarding the gorgeous Miss Sarah run away with us, because old Jenkins stuck his head around the door and told us that we'd all be in trouble with out elders and betters and didn't we know it was ten past one?

No time to waste, then.  I took a chance and, instead of going back the way I came, cut through the front door of the shop.  It didn't work.  Mr Elias Cholmondley gave me a particularly unpleasant smirk, told me that Master had missed me and cursed me for treading snow onto his nice clean carpet.

'Peter,' Master James regarded me mildly from his stool as I dashed into the workshop.  'You're late.'  His ocelot-daemon looked up at me from her place next to him on the bench.

'I'm sorry, Master.  It won't happen again.'

'Hmm.  I must have a word with Mr Jenkins about his timekeeping.  It ill becomes a clockmaker to be late for an appointment, even if it is only with his master.'

'No, Master.'  I started to take off my muffler.

'Keep that on, Peter.  As you seem to like the open air so much, perhaps you can run an errand for me.'

My heart sank.  It was still freezing cold outside, though the earlier clouds had drifted away and the sun was shining out of a clear blue sky.

'I'd thought to send it by messenger, but I think the exercise will do you good.  Can you get down the walnut mantel clock from the second shelf?'  I saw it.  It had come in a week ago for cleaning and Master had kept it in the shop until he was sure that it was correctly regulated and keeping proper time.

Have you heard of the Zanzibar Fallacy, by the way?  Jim told me this one, and it tickled me.  Remind me and I'll pass it on to you, when I'm not so busy telling you about this particular day.

I took the clock down and wrapped it up in brown paper and string.  'Where shall I take it, Master?' I asked.

'Here, I'll write it down for you.'  Master wrote the address on a label and stuck it on the wrappings for me.

'Is it all paid for?'

'Let's see,' looking in his ledger, 'there was a deposit of half-a-crown left, so there's just five shillings remaining to pay.  Can you remember that?'

'Yes, master.'

'Then off you go!'

Off I went.


	3. I meet the Professor

Viola and I walked across Oxford until we got to our destination.

No, that won't do.  I showed this bit to Jim and he burst out laughing.

'You can't write that!'

'What do you mean, I can't write that?  What's wrong with it?  It's what happened!'

'Yes, all right, but it won't do for this.  This is actual writing you're doing here and I'm going to make sure you do it properly!'

'What do you mean by "properly"?'

Jim sat back in the alcove and smiled at me.  If he wasn't my best friend I've have minded it, but he is, so I let him carry on.  After all, he does work for a bookbinder, so he must know something about writing books.  He's seen thousands of them.

'Who do you think is reading this… stuff… you're scribbling?'

'I don't know.  People, I suppose.  And their daemons.'

'What sort of people?'

'People who can read.'

Jim sighed.  'Stars above, you can be thick sometimes.  Of course they can read.  But who are they?  Where are they from?  What do they know about you?  Or who you are?  Or where you live?'

'Everyone's heard of Oxford.  And it says my name, Peter Joyce, on the front page.'

'Has everyone heard of Oxford?  Really?  What about if they come from New Denmark?  Or the Republic of Texas?  Or Frankland, or Kathay, or Muscovy or the Antipodean Islands?  You've got to tell them more than that.  Don't assume that just because you know something, everybody else must know it too.  Oxford isn't the centre of the world, and neither are you.

'And there's another thing.  Readers like to read.'

'Duh!'

'No, I mean it.  They actually enjoy the words.  Just saying "Viola and me went to Jordan College", or whatever it was, is short-changing them.  Give them something to chew on.'

'You told me there was a rule of writing that says "don't write the stuff that people don't want to read".'

'That's about not writing waffle.  Not about not writing anything!'

Thanks, Jim.  If you're from around here you'll know all about Oxford so I apologise in advance for wasting your time telling you things you already know.  Just chew on the words, eh?

Otherwise, for your benefit if you're from Kathay, or Hindustan, or the Warlike Planet; the University of Oxford is the main centre of learning in Brytain.  I have heard of other rival establishments in Cantabriensis and Mancunia, and natural philosophy is said to be understood very well at the Imperial Chapel in London, but they pale in comparison with the age and distinction of the Colleges of Oxford.  Of those Colleges, the oldest and most distinguished is Jordan College, where Viola and I were taking our parcel.

Like all proper cities, Oxford is built by a river; the Isis.  It's got a tributary, the Cherwell, which runs down to it around the back of some of the newer colleges and there's an artificial canal too, which carries traffic on barges up to Banbury and beyond.

I've always liked canals.  There's something about the smell of them, coal-smoke and still water, that makes me think of when I was a kid, growing up with my Mum and Dad, by the Grand Junction in the small town of Tring.  So even though it was so extremely freezing cold and I didn't really want to be out in the open air at all, I didn't follow the straight route to Jordan, which was only about a quarter of a mile away, but wandered down to the wharf to see if there were any boats in.  

The wharf is by Hythe Bridge Street, a hundred yards or so down the hill towards the railway station.  The pavement was slippery with ice and snow and people were sliding along, or risking their lives by walking in the roadway.  Carts, and fiacres, and gas-engine powered autobuses were hooting or shouting at them to get out of their way and the crush was pretty bad, so it took us a while to get there.  Having a squirrel-daemon is great!  Viola was able to run along the tops of the walls, jumping across the gateways, always taking care not to get too far away, of course.  I love to watch her when she does this.

I usually lean on the iron railings at the crown of the bridge when I want to look at the boats, but the crush was dangerous, so I went, very carefully, down the steps onto the wharf-side itself.  I could see straight away that there wasn't going to be very much more traffic through the basin in the near future.  There was a film of ice on the top of the water that would, if there was a hard frost tonight, thicken up and make it impossible for the boats to pass along the canal tomorrow unless they could get an ice-breaker through first.

There were four gyptian boats moored up there, and I made a note of their names – _Pride of Limerick_, _Mavis_ and a motor-boat and butty pair, _Maggie_ and _Jimmy_.  The motor-boat tows the butty boat, by the way, in case you're wondering.  They were all proper working boats, tough and dependable, and their paintwork and brass fittings were shining green and red and gold in the pale sunlight.  Gyptians take great pride in their boats.

'What does you want?'  A little man in a grey felt cap poked his head up out of the cabin of the _Maggie_.  His magpie-daemon perched on the coaming next to him.

'Nothing, mister.  Just looking.'

'Look somewhere else!'  The hatch closed with a slam behind him.

'Don't hurt to look!' But he was gone.  Sod him, then.  Like I said, I grew up next to the canal and I've met, and mostly got on with, lots of gyptian families – had rides on their boats and everything.  There's always one, though.

We climbed the slippery hill back up to the centre of town and pushed through the crowds to the main entrance of Jordan College.  If you've been to Oxford, you've seen Jordan.  All the day tours go there, although they don't usually get much further than the Entrance Quad and maybe a quick look inside the Public Oratory.  The place is so old, and so rambling and so many of the new bits – meaning that they're only three hundred years old or so – have been built on top of, or beside, or occasionally underneath, the old bits, that finding your way around is an absolute nightmare.  They do say that the south-east extension is haunted by the ghosts of a Cook's Tour who became lost in the cloisters and never found their way out and were doomed to go round and round it for ever until they fell to their knees and died of exhaustion.

They do say that, but it's all bollocks.

I stuck my head into the porter's lodge and showed them the label on the parcel.  The porter gave me a long list of directions, ending with '…and then it's the second landing on the north-east stair in the third quadrangle after the Stone Passage.  Right next to the Whistling Hall.  You can't miss it!'

'Thanks.'  I'd have asked him to take it for me, but you wouldn't expect a porter to carry things, would you?  Anyway, there was five shillings to collect.

It only took ten minutes, though it felt longer, and several wrong turnings before I found what I was fairly sure was the right stair.  A look at the name-card by the entrance told me I was right.  I trudged up the creaking wooden flight until I reached the second landing.  There was the door I wanted, and to my relief it wasn't shut.  See, if a College resident shuts his door completely, it's called "sporting his oak" and it means Do Not Disturb.  If it's open, even only a little bit, then it's all right to knock.  I knocked, and a voice – an unexpected voice – called to me to come in.

I opened the door wide and walked into the room, my parcel tucked under my arm.  There was someone sitting at a large desk by the window.  I couldn't see very clearly, as the light was streaming in through it, dazzling me.

'I'm sorry,' I said.  'I'm looking for,' I held up the parcel and looked at the label again, 'I'm looking for Professor Belacqua.   Do you know where he is?'

The person at the desk stood up and turned to me so that I could see her face.  She took off her spectacles.

'I'm Professor Belacqua,' she said, and smiled.  'It's a common mistake.'

I looked back towards her, dumbstruck.

'Then this is for you,' I said stupidly, and held the parcel out towards her.  She took it.

'Thank you.'  She looked at the label.  'You have come from James and James?'

'Yes, Madam Professor.'  I was remembering my manners.

'It is a cold day for a boy with no greatcoat to be out on his master's business.  Is your master a hard man?'

'No, Madam Professor.'

'There are messengers who could have carried this.'  She frowned.  'Are you feeling cold now?'

'A little cold, Madam Professor.'

'Then sit down by the fire and become a little warmer.'  I sat in an upholstered chair next to the fire, which was small, but burning brightly and cheerfully.  'Would you like something to drink?'

'Yes please, Madam Professor.  Do you have any chocolatl?  Or chai?'

Professor Belacqua looked down towards me from where she stood by her desk.  The sunlight pouring through the window lit up her hair from behind, making a sort of golden halo around her face.

'I'm sure I can find something.'  I expected her to ring a bell for her scout – that's what the College servants are called – but instead she passed into another room next to the one I was sitting in.  I heard the clatter of a kettle and the clang of a saucepan and realised to my astonishment that she – a full Professor of Jordan College – was boiling milk to make chocolatl for me, Peter Joyce, the clockmaker's boy of James and James, Shoe Lane, Oxford.

Was it then that I lost my heart to her?


	4. I am introduced to the alethiometer

'Nah!  Of course it wasn't!'

'What do you know?' I glared at Jim.  'What about that Romulo and Gianetta, in that play?'

'That was different.  They were both young.  Gianetta was only twelve.  That sort of age, you do stupid things like fall in love at first sight.'

'It wasn't first sight.'

'Good as.  How old was she, your Professor?'

'I dunno.  Over thirty.'

'More like forty, I'll bet.  Old enough to be your mother.'

'Oh shut up!  Look, she was kind to me.  She didn't have to be.'

'Are you really trying to tell me that you fell for this dried-up old Prof just because she made you a hot drink?'

'It… well…'

'My auntie makes me chocolatl when I go to see her.  Gives me pasties and cake, too.  Doesn't mean I want to bed her.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'Oh no?'

'No.  It wasn't.'

'All right.'  Jim handed me back my exercise book.  'Write it down the way it was.  Convince me.'

While the Professor and her daemon were busy in what I supposed was her kitchen, I warmed my hands at the fire (they'd got cold holding the parcel) and looked around the room.  It was very much the sort of room you'd have expected a professor to live in – there were elmwood shelves all around the walls, filled with books of all kinds.  There were huge heavy looking leather-bound volumes on wide deep shelves near the floor and smaller books on the narrower shelves further up.   There was a smaller bookcase by the desk, and the books in it looked especially old and well-used.  The floor was partly covered by an old and worn, but probably priceless, carpet and there was a round mahogany table in the middle of it, piled up with yet more books and the walnut mantel clock, still in its wrappings where the Professor had put it down.  Next to the clock there was a large piece of what looked like sky-iron, blackened with shiny edges.  If the sun hadn't been slanting into the room through the windows it would all have been very dark and depressing, but as it was the ancient panelling which covered the walls caught the light and threw it back into the air, changed to a warm orange glow.

The sunlight caught something else, too.  There was an instrument of some kind glinting on the Professor's desk.  I wondered what it was, so I got up from my chair and went over to take a closer look at it, Viola following me.

We sometimes get scientific instruments in for repair at James and James.  Theodolites, sextants, astrolabes, lodestones; that sort of thing.  So I was interested, in a professional way you might say, in this particular device.  At first I thought it was a large pocket watch, nicely made in brass and gold.  Then I realised that that couldn't be right.  None of the four hands were moving, and there were too many divisions around the outside.   (I've seen a few twenty-four hour clocks, by the way.  They're strange, with all the hours of the day around the bezel, but this instrument had more markings, even, than that.)

No.  I looked again.  Was it a compass?  I noticed that there were three knurled wheels spaced around the rim.  I was tempted to try turning one of them but something, Providence maybe, stopped me.  I guessed that the wheels adjusted the hands in some way.  That would account for three of them, and perhaps the other pointer was free to move.  I'd come across a compass like that once; where you adjust the dial so that when you hold the compass out in front of you and let the lodestone point to north, the compass, and you, are pointing the way you want to go.  Perhaps this was an advanced version of one of those, they call them "silver", compasses.  But why would you want to go three different ways at the same time?

'It's called an alethiometer.'

I turned round, no doubt looking as guilty as I felt.

'I didn't touch it, Madam Professor.'

The Professor leaned over the desk and examined the dial of the instrument.  Her daemon – a pine-marten – jumped up and looked at it too. 'No, I can see that.  I'm glad you didn't – it might have upset the work I'm doing.'

She was holding two white china mugs; one frothing with chocolatl and the other full of India tea.  'Come and sit down again, where you can't get into any trouble.'

She was smiling at me, her face both grave and amused.  I've never really understood the Professor's expression.  When she's laughing at some feeble joke I've made, or telling a mischievous story at the expense of one of her stuffy male colleagues, her pale blue eyes sparkle and she'll grin like a young girl, and perhaps only I and a few others who know her very well suspect that she's hiding an inner sadness.  But at other times, when there was sorrow or danger, what you saw in her face was that there was a spring of joyful confidence deep inside her, bubbling up all the time and saying _Don't worry, Peter.  Everything will work out for the best in the end._

We sat facing each other by the fire, me slurping noisily at my hot chocolatl and the Professor drinking her tea.  Without actually seeming to question me, and without telling me a great deal about herself, she found out that my name was Peter Joyce, that I came from Tring, where my father and mother and younger brother were still living.  I told her that my father was a master ropemaker, but that he'd decided not to take me into his trade, as I wasn't big or strong enough.  Rope-making is strenuous work and it can be dangerous too.  I told her about the time, when I was only eight, when I took the kitchen clock apart, and put it back together too, and dismantled the aneroid barometer (we get those at James and James, from time to time) and almost put that together right, except that it always seemed to say the weather would be stormy when it turned out to be fair, or the other way around.

I explained that there was a famous Grammar School in Tring, but as we weren't gentry it would have been unlikely that I'd have been able to study there – and, anyway, I'd have hated it – so it had been decided to apprentice me to Master James.  There's a sort of arrangement the Guilds have, when it comes to sorting out who gets apprenticed to whom.

In return, the Professor told me that she had lived nearly all her life in Oxford.  Her mother and father had died almost thirty years ago, but she had a sister whose name was Elizabeth and who lived in a big house not far from town.  I supposed, without thinking about it very much, that she was the housekeeper there, or something like that.

I finished off my chocolatl with a final, satisfied, slurp.

'Thank you, Madam Professor.  I must go now; my master will be wondering where I am.  But please…'

'Yes?'

'Could I take another look at your alethi… instrument?'

The Professor laughed.  'Yes, of course, Peter.'  She stood up and her daemon – I knew now that his name was Pantalaimon, which seemed like rather a mouthful and I suspected that she probably called him Pan.  (Viola has always insisted on me using her full name.  She hates being called "Vi") – followed her.  Viola clung onto my muffler, which was hanging loosely around my shoulders.

'Don't touch the wheels,' she said, 'but you can pick it up if you like.'

I bent over the desk and took the alethiometer, holding it carefully in my cupped right hand.  'What does it do?' I asked.

'It's an oracular device.  It tells the truth.'

'Sorry?'

'Do you see all those symbols around the outside?'

I looked around the rim of the bezel.  There they were, thirty-six tiny pictures engraved in black on what looked like ivory.  'Yes, Madam Professor.'

'Each of those symbols has a meaning.  In fact each symbol has many meanings; a primary meaning and a set of further ones; secondary, tertiary, quaternary and so on.'

'But what do you do with it?'  I was no clearer as to the instrument's purpose.

'Suppose that I want to discover something that is unknown, or hidden, or obscure, like, oh I don't know…'

'What's for dinner tonight?'

'I could open the window and sniff the air if I wanted to know that.'

'How about… What is my master doing now?  Or; will I get into trouble when I get back to the shop?'

The Professor looked sternly at me.  'The alethiometer does not predict.  It is not a toy.  Nor is it a fairground attraction, to be used to catch pennies from the credulous.  Lives have been lost and people – good people – have suffered at the hands of the Church to preserve this instrument.'  Her expression softened.  'I'll answer your first question for you.  It is a simple one and the reading will not be difficult.

'Now, you carry on holding it.  We need to set the three pointers according to their meanings and their relevance to the question.  Let's start with Master James.  He is your master, so I will set the first pointer to the Sun, which signifies Authority.  He is also a skilled craftsman, which makes the selection of the second pointer straightforward.  I will choose the Cauldron, which signifies Alchemy as its primary meaning, but also Craft or Achieved Wisdom.  Lastly, we are interested in his work, so I'm going to set the third pointer to the Beehive, which as I am sure you can guess, means Productive Work.  Now, with the enquiry framed mechanically, the practised alethiometrist needs to concentrate his mind on the question, which I will now do…'

She stopped speaking, and looked startled.  The needle had begun to move, of its own accord.  It spun and whirled around the dial, stopping at certain positions for a second, only to move on, randomly it seemed, and spin again for a few seconds, before stopping again.  I looked up, to see the Professor's lips moving as she, she told me later, memorised the places where the needle stopped.

After a minute or so the needle's movement stopped.  I realised suddenly that I had been holding my breath and let it out with a great whoosh.  I put the alethiometer back on the desk, aware that my hand was shaking.

The Professor stared at me.  I could tell that she had received quite a surprise.

'The needle stopped on the Sun, the Compass, the Griffin and the Hourglass. Your master is making a clock for a person in authority, who has control over money.  It could be the town clerk or the mayor.'

'Yes, Madam Professor, that's quite right.  We're making a long-case clock for the mayor.'

Professor Belacqua, unconsciously I'm sure, lifted her right hand and patted her hair into place.

'Peter, please sit down.  Can you tell me what you did, while I was setting the pointers?'

'Nothing!'  Had I done something wrong?  We sat down in our old places by the fire.  The Professor leaned forward and searched my face.  'Were you thinking about the question that we were putting to the alethiometer?'

'Yes, I suppose I was.'

'I wasn't.  I never do.  First I set the pointers, and then I consider the question.

'Peter, the needle didn't move for me.  _It moved for you_.'

'Doesn't that happen anyway?  When anyone asks it a question?'

'I have only seen it happen for one person before.'

'Who was that?'

'Me.' The Professor shrugged; an odd gesture for her.

'Can we try it again?'  I was keen to have another go.

'No, Peter, sorry.  You've got to go back to your master, and I have work to do as well.  I was in the middle of a complicated reading when you came in.  Fortunately, I have my notes and can continue the divination.

'Will you come and see me again?  Next week?'

'My master may not let me go.'

'I will send for you.  There are, at last count, at least one thousand three hundred clocks in Jordan College.  I am sure that Master James would like to stay on good terms with us.'  The Professor winked, which was the last thing I expected from her.

I wrapped my muffler around my neck, scooped up Viola, and turned for the door.

'Peter?'

'Yes?'

'Don't forget your master's five shillings!'  Professor Belacqua, smiling broadly and looking all of twelve years old, was holding out a coin.  I took it, bowed awkwardly to her, and left the room, pulling the door almost, but not quite, shut behind me.  She hadn't even glanced at the mantel clock where she had left it on the table, next to the piece of sky-iron.


	5. I neglect my work

Master James made me work late that night, to make up the time I'd wasted that afternoon.  I missed supper.

Carrie took pity on me and brought me some ham and cheese sandwiches.  'It's not like you, Peter, getting in Master's bad books like that!  Staying late in the pub, and taking an hour and a half to deliver a package to Jordan!'

I scarcely heard her, and she shook her head and left me standing in the workshop, wiping a lacquer-soaked rag in a lazy circle over the case of the Mayor's clock.  My mind was whirring like a loose escapement when the regulator has come detached.

Was I special, after all?  Some kind of child prodigy?  Did I have amazing powers, which had only now come to light?  Probably my mum and dad weren't my real parents at all.  I was more likely to be the wrong-side-of-the-blanket offspring of a Lord, or the Dean of Jordan College.  Perhaps I would move into Jordan, have rooms next to Professor Belacqua, and spend my time sharpening my skills with the alethiometer.  I could see myself already, impressive in mortarboard and gown, strolling down the Broad with my fellow dons, looking down my nose at the townies.

Not good enough for Tring Grammar School, eh?

That night, as I stretched out on my mattress under the shop counter, I noticed something that I had somehow come to forget over the past year or so.  The shop _ticked_.  Yes, all the clocks on the walls and in the display cabinets ticked.

Of course they did, I hear you say.  What else do you expect to find in a clockmaker's shop, but clocks?  And what else do clocks do, but tick?  And tock?  Assuming they've been wound up, of course.

(Like all mechanisms, clocks should be kept wound up and running.  They seize up if they're allowed to run down, and then you have to take them to the clockmaker's to be cleaned and oiled.  Wait a minute; why am I telling you this?  It's bad for business!  You just leave those clocks alone!)

The thing is, I'd got accustomed to the ticking.  I'd become part of the place, settled in.  I'm sure that if you'd taken my pulse you'd have found that it was ticking too, keeping time with the clocks.  The only time I noticed the sound was when I'd been away for a day or two – on a visit home, maybe – and returned late on a quiet Sunday evening.

Jane Phipps, who works at Maison Jeanette next to Sarah (they all hate her there!), told me one hot summer's day, as we sat drinking lemonade on the barrier that prevents the cabbies using Shoe Lane as a short cut to the High, about something similar that happens to her sometimes.

'If I'm working on a piece of material, and it's a really bright colour, like red, and I look up at the wall, which is white, it looks green to me.  For a while, anyway.'

'That's because your eyes have got used to seeing red light, and they've adjusted to it.  Compensated for it.'

I think Jane quite fancied me at one time, but I started to neglect her as that winter turned to spring.  Viola chided me about this, as she did about everything.

I'm getting ahead of myself.  What I will say is that the vision of the lovely Sarah with which I used to console myself at bedtime was replaced that night by the face of someone else altogether.

Over the next few days Master James was first puzzled, then increasingly irritated, by what he called my "dozy self".  I was making silly, clumsy, mistakes, and not concentrating properly on my work.  It would have been better, I know, to have put Professor Belacqua's promise of another try with the alethiometer to the back of my mind and simply get on with the job of learning my trade, but somehow I couldn't do it.  I'd be polishing the dome of a carriage clock and drift away, looking up to see Master James staring at me, his usually placid face screwed up with annoyance.

'Peter!  Wake up!  You'll wear through the glass!'

'Sorry, master.'

The funny thing is that when I tried to remember what Professor Belacqua actually looked like, I couldn't do it.  There was just a blurry impression in my mind of a slender figure dressed in severe academic black, a mane of frizzy honey-coloured hair tied back at her neck and a soft voice, pitched low.  Her eyes too, of course, clear and pale blue, and the skin around them crinkling when she smiled, which was often.

The worst part was not knowing when she would send for me again.  It would be very awkward if it was during my working hours, for Master James had a perfect right to expect me to be in his shop at that time.  I couldn't just go wandering off whenever I felt like it.

I had time off during the week, of course.  Wednesday was half-day closing, so Mr Cholmondley had that afternoon free.  I didn't – it was a full working day in the workshop.  To make up for it, I got Saturday afternoons off.  Then there was Sunday…

I don't know what it's like where you live, but for me Sundays were absolute torture.  I've no idea how sincere Master James' religious beliefs were, but that scarcely mattered.  If you wanted to be a successful businessman in Oxford, you had to be seen to be a devout churchgoer.  Not just you, but your whole family too.  Heaven only knows what it was like, back before I was born, when the Church Police and the Magisterium were in charge of everything.  I hear you got excommunicated if you failed to genuflect to the image of the Magdelena by the front of the Oratory, or excruciated if you swore in its neighbourhood.

No, it wasn't that bad, but we still had to attend the Public Oratory three times every Sunday – Mass, Matins and Evensong, each service more than two hours long.  And, in between, hardly time to eat, and certainly no chance of going out and enjoying yourself.  I don't know when it was worse; winter, when the old building seemed to freeze you up, or summer when you could glimpse the sunshine through a high window and wish with all your heart that you were out there enjoying it.

That Sunday was probably no worse than any other, but it seemed it.  As a member of the James family, I was marched into the Oratory and took my usual place in our usual pew, halfway back on the right-hand side of the nave, as befitted our social status.  Master sat next to the aisle, then their daughter Emily, fair-haired and chubby, then Carrie, then the mistress, sternly determined that there should be no funny business between Carrie and myself (most unlikely!) and last, me.  Our daemons sat, as is usual, on the shelf which was attached to the back of the pew in front of us.

The preacher droned on and on; we stood up to sing the dreary hymns, or sat while he harangued us with threats of hell if we didn't behave ourselves, or knelt down to pray, and all the time it seemed even more pointless than ever.  Look, no offence.  If Observance is meaningful to you, then fine.  It's just never been that way for me, and that Sunday was worse than it had ever been before.

When we returned to Shoe Lane after Matins there was something waiting for me.  A formal note from the College porter, on Jordan College headed paper, requesting my presence in Professor Belacqua's rooms that afternoon.  I asked Master James if I might be excused attending Evensong.

'No, certainly not.'

'But Master!'

'No, Peter.  Even if your conduct this week had been exemplary, I could not permit you to miss a Divine Service.  You have not performed your duty to me; should I also allow you to default in doing your duty to God?'

I stared blankly.  There was nothing I could do about it.  My Master's word was, quite literally, law.  I was completely in his power.  As I've said, I liked my Master and enjoyed working for him and learning from him, and so I swallowed my disappointment, looked down to my feet and said, 'No Master.'

He was a good man and right, by his own lights.  What else could I do?  Running away would get me nowhere.  Viola comforted me, sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear.

'There'll be another time.  Another chance.'  It was kind of her, but I doubted it.

That night, for the first time since I arrived in Oxford, I cried myself to sleep.

And that night, I had the strangest dream.  It was as if I had been sleeping deeply and been awakened by someone nibbling my ear.  I sat up, wondering if something had disturbed Viola, but she was in her usual place, curled up by my right side.  Have you ever had one of those dreams, where you dream that you've woken up?

Anyway, I looked around and saw possibly the last thing I expected.  The Professor's daemon, the pine-marten with the funny name, was sitting on the floor next to my mattress, looking up at me with an annoyed expression, if a pine-marten's face can be said to have an expression at all.  But you know how it is with daemons; you can catch what they're thinking, whatever their form.  There was no sign of the Professor, so I knew this was a dream, (even though I was dreaming) although I wasn't sure whether it wasn't going to turn into a nightmare.  A daemon without her human, indeed!  (I'm sorry if you find this part of my story upsetting.  If I'd been awake, I'd have been horrified and upset too.  But it was only a dream, you see.)

The dream-daemon spoke: 'Why didn't you come?'

'Come?'

'Come to see us.'

'Master wouldn't let me.'  Better play along with the dream.

'Why not?'

'I had to go to Evensong.'

'Oh,' the dream-daemon shook his head sadly, 'you poor thing.  Couldn't you get out of it?'

'Only if I wanted my master to cancel my indentures and send me home in disgrace!'

'Hmmm.' The daemon paused to think about this.  I looked about myself, in my dream.  The ticking darkness of the shop was unchanged.  I'm sure that if the Professor had been there I'd have known it.

'When can you come and see us?'

'Not until Saturday afternoon.  That's the first chance I'll get.'

'Saturday afternoon…  We'll have to postpone a tutorial… Yes, all right, if that's the only day you can make it.  We'll see you on Saturday.'

He looked at me closely.  'You will come, won't you?  Lyra would be very disappointed if you didn't come to see her.'

'Yes.  I'll come.  I promise.'

'See that you do.'

And he winked at me, leapt over the counter, ran up the wall, and disappeared.

The dream ended as suddenly as it had begun, and I slipped back into normal sleep.

When I woke, cold and hungry, on Monday morning, I found that the dream had stuck in my mind, as they sometimes do.  One word in particular had lodged itself in my memory.  _Lyra_.  Why had the dream-daemon called her _Lyra_?  Why that name?  Where, from which part of the depths of my imagination, had that name come from?  The label on the parcel I had taken to her had read simply _Professor Belacqua, Jordan College_.  There had been no initial and certainly no first name written there.

So it hit me with all the greater force when, at lunchtime, Elias "Mr" Cholmondley summoned me into the shop at the front.

'Lady come in,' he said.

'Oh yes?  One of yours, eh?'

'No.  Called for you, she did.  Bit old for me.'

I bit my lip.  What was going on?

'Left a note, she did.  Not sure I should give it to you; a note from an older woman.  Might be something sinful.  You got an assignation planned?'

'Don't be daft.  Give it here!'

He held the note up, smirking.  'Jump for it, then.'

'Sod you!'  I kicked his ankle, hard, and he howled and doubled over, rubbing at the bruise with his free hand.  I grabbed the note from him and exited, fast, into the back of the shop.

I broke the seal and unfolded the note with shaking hands.  It read:

_Dear Peter,_

_So glad you can come and see me again this Saturday.  Would two o'clock in my rooms suit you?_

_Best wishes,_

_Lyra Belacqua_

I told you back there that I'd let my fancies run away with me the week before about seeing the Professor, for so I still thought of her even though she'd told me her name.  Now that I was certain I would be able to visit her again, and the awful doubt was removed, my mind was more at peace and I could pay proper attention to my work.  Master James was pleased, I know.  He probably thought I'd been mooning over Jane, or fallen out with Carrie.

So the week passed more quickly than I could have possibly imagined it would, and the following Saturday, after a hastily bolted lunch and free of my obligations to my master until that night's twelve o'clock curfew, I set out, on a blustery day with the clouds racing overhead, for Jordan College.

I am sure that, that time at least, I was not followed.


	6. I continue my studies with the Professor

I showed Professor Belacqua's note to the porter at the entrance to Jordan College and he waved me through.  'Go on, young man.  Prof's waiting for you!'

The wind was gusting around the cloisters and threatening to tug my muffler, and Viola, away from me.  I had no wish to find out exactly how far I could stand having her taken away from me before it started to hurt, so I caught her in my hand and she burrowed into my pocket.

(I was talking about unsettling dreams before, wasn't I?  Like finding yourself walking down the Broad with absolutely no clothes on, or soiling yourself in public, or falling from a high tower.  The one which really gets to me is where I'm on a train, or sometimes it's an autobus, and Viola gets left behind by mistake and she's running after me but she can't catch up and we're being pulled further and further apart and it's hurting like the Seven Fires Of Hell and I'm crying out to the driver to stop and he won't or he doesn't hear me because my voice is all tiny and choked and I can't get off and the pain gets worse and worse and worse and I wake up screaming and screaming.

Oh.  You have that one too.  Sorry.)

I found the Professor's rooms and knocked on the door.  'Come in,' she called out from inside and I went in.  She was sitting at her desk in the window, just as I had seen her the first time, but there was another chair placed next to hers.

'Peter!'  She smiled at me.  'I'm so relieved you could come this time.  I should have known that Sunday would be difficult for you.  Would you like some chocolatl?'

'Yes please, Madam Professor.'

'Sit down there, then,' she pointed to the second seat, 'and I'll make some for you.'

I'm sure that her daemon Pantalaimon, who was sitting on the desk, looked up and winked at me again.

The Professor went into her little kitchen and made chocolatl for me and chai for herself, just as she had before.  She returned holding a tray loaded with mugs and a plate of orange cakes.  How did she know I liked them?

(Professor Belacqua's rooms were, as I later found out, rather unusual.  She was the only female professor in the whole of Jordan College and special arrangements had had to be made to accommodate her.  Most of the senior academic staff in Jordan had a small suite of rooms, which usually meant a study and a bedroom.  They were expected to share bathrooms and privies with the other scholars on their stair.  Of course, this wouldn't be right for Professor Belacqua so, despite some of the older and more hidebound dons in the Senior Common Room kicking up a fuss, a set of rooms was converted to provide her with a private bathroom and kitchen.)

I talked over what to do about the next part of my story with Jim, my friend and tame literary expert, while we were sitting in the snug of the Talbot Inn last Thursday lunchtime.  You see, if this was a story I was making up for fun, or to sell on the bookstalls, it would all flow along smoothly, one part of the tale leading you, the eager reader, right on to the next one.  If I was writing it in that way, as Jim said I should, then the things that happened later would happen now.  No, try again.

What I mean is that there wouldn't be the gap between the interesting bits that there actually was.  My first visit to Professor Belacqua would have been followed straight away by the business with the gyptians and the IID, as it was called.  What Jim likes to call the "story arc", whatever that might mean.

But this was real life, my real life anyway, and I'm a clockmaker's apprentice, not a novelist, so you'll have to put up with what Jim calls a "bald and unconvincing narrative".  Bastard.

What actually happened over the next few weeks is that I settled into a new routine.  During the days I worked for my master, learning my trade the best I could.  In the evenings I worked for myself.  You see, I had to study for my City and Guilds exams in my own time.  There are a number of qualifications you have to get before you can set up as a master in any Guild craft.  Just having your master sign off your testimonial isn't good enough.  I had to prove that I could read and write, and perform the simpler arithmetics.  There was an ethics test too, which amused me.  How could you take an exam in ethics?

Sundays were the same awful drag they ever were.  But Saturdays…

Saturdays were the days I really looked forward to.  Not to the extent that I didn't pay proper attention to my work during the rest of the week.  I'd learned my lesson there.  But on those blessed Saturdays, as I mounted the ancient stair to the Professor's rooms, I would feel my heart expanding in my breast, and my spirits lift.

Not that Professor Belacqua gave me an easy time.  She had made it clear to me from the first, as we sat at her desk drinking our chai and chocolatl and munching our orange cakes, that learning to read the alethiometer was not a task to be taken up lightly.

'It took me many years of study before I could perform the simplest of readings without using the books.'  She pointed to the shelf of well-thumbed books that I had noticed by her desk.  'I still need them for the more complex divinations.'

For a moment, that underlying sadness appeared again on her face.  I didn't understand it then.

It was several weeks before she allowed me to touch the instrument again, to my great disappointment.  I had to learn to concentrate and use my memory as I had never before.  The spinning needle of the alethiometer didn't wait for the reader to make a note of where it stopped, or how often, or in what order.  It just carried on whirling and it was up to me to remember what it did.

She gave me memory exercises to do, like remembering lists of names, or long strings of figures and saying them back to her.  Sometimes she would interrupt me in the middle of my recitation and make me give her the fifth name in the list, or the third from the end.  I often stumbled and got lost and sometimes I would cry out aloud and curse in my frustration.

She put up with my outbursts with great patience and understanding, never losing her temper or mocking my childishness.  'Try again, Peter.  The first name in the list was "Henry".  See if you can carry on from there in order.'

I screwed up the courage one day to ask her if I should give up my work with Master James.  I still had this silly idea that I might be able to study with her every day.  I'd live in the College, and…

'No, Peter.'  She gave me that grave smile of hers.  'Master James is a good man.  I can tell that from looking at you and talking to you.  A bad master makes a bad apprentice, so they say.  The last thing I want to do is to cause any trouble between you and your master.  Besides, these are early days.  You have a great deal to learn – about everything.  Let's just go slowly, shall we?'  She rested her hand briefly on my arm.

And so she twisted my heart around her little finger.

One other thing, which seemed unimportant at the time, happened in early spring, as the grass in the parks was beginning to grow again, and the hedgerows along the lanes starting to flower.  Master called me over to his bench (I was polishing a spindle on the small lathe) and showed me an instrument that had been brought in for attention.

'What do you make of that, Peter?'  He handed it over to me and I examined it, turning it over in my hands.  It was a brass cylinder, about four inches in diameter and three inches high, with a white dial protected by a convex crystal.  It looked a little like an autobus speedometer except that the dial was slightly unusual, as it had two hands, one above the other, each pointing to its own scale.  The upper scale was calibrated from zero to ten in tenths and labelled "Attitude".  The lower scale had no markings at all, but a strip of continuous colour, varying from blue on the left hand side to red on the right.  Its legend read "Transvergence", which was a word I had never heard before.

I looked at the back of the instrument, expecting to find a drive shaft, or more likely two drive shafts, or maybe one or two sockets or a mounting point for a Bowden cable, but there was nothing there at all.  The back plate was completely blank.  It was made of a kind of slick, glossy black material that I had not seen before.

I gave it back to Master James.  'How does it work, Master?'

'I do not know.'

'What are we supposed to be doing with it?  What's wrong with it?'

'The person who brought it in complained that the pointers were sticking.  I suggested that we might replace the plain bearings with jewelled ones, and she agreed.'

'May I help you with it, Master?'  The curious device intrigued me.

'Certainly, Peter.'  Master James looked at me over the top of his demi-lune spectacles.  'I'm always pleased to see you taking an active interest in your work.'

The next day we stripped down the instrument and fitted the jewelled bearings.  The mystery of how the pointers were driven was solved when we unscrewed the rear panel.  There were coils of copper wire wrapped around an iron core and a couple of lodestones connected to the spindles.  It must have been operated anbarically.  For my own interest I made sketches of the internal layout and tried to work out how the copper wires were connected.

The instrument was collected two days later and five guineas left, which was an extraordinary amount of money for such a simple job.  Master slipped an extra florin into my pay packet that Friday.

That was it, really.  I could add that my mates in Shoe Lane used to take the mickey out of me for missing out on our Saturday afternoon trips (we had a pub football team, too, although I wasn't much of a player) and make coarse jokes about my dodgy relationship with an older woman (Fred had spilled the beans after I had told him about my visits to the Professor one boozy Friday lunchtime).

Jane got wind of it, too.  I can't help it; I feel guilty when I think about how I treated her.  She was a nice girl, and she liked me, and I liked her, but she was never in the same intellectual league as Lyra, and though I suppose I could have found a way for us to spend some time together, I'd have been thinking of someone else all the while, and it would have been no better than self-abuse when it came down to it.  I kept telling myself that it was all for the best, and that I was being cruel to be kind, but it still felt like snobbishness to me.  If I hadn't been so caught up with the Professor, I'd have found a way to treat her fairly.  I mean; I'd found a way to balance my work with Master James and my study with her, so why couldn't I be nice to Jane?

If I'd had any sense I'd have mentioned it to the Professor, and she's have smiled her slow smile, and we'd have sat by the fire and drunk kaffee, and talked sensibly about it and she'd have shown me the way I should go.  But for that to happen, I would have had to confess my feelings to her, and I could never do that.  I was too afraid that she would turn me away if she knew that I had those kinds of feelings, if for no other reason than the strict College rules regarding teachers and their students.  It wasn't so long ago, she told me once, that all the teaching and research staff in the College had to be ordained in the Church (which would, of course, have disqualified her as no woman then, or now, can be a minister) and take an oath of celibacy.  Celibacy!  Didn't she know what sweet torment it was for me to sit so close to her, breathing in the faint musky smell of her skin and hearing her soft voice murmuring ancient wisdom in my ears?

So the days and weeks passed, happily mostly, and spring glowed green, yellow and violet in the gardens and window boxes of the City of Oxford.  It should have been a happy time, a good time, a time of new life, new promises and new hope for all of us.  But it was not.  For there was a word about, spoken out of the side of the mouth in hidden places by frightened men and women.  An old word, an ugly word, a word that smelled of fear and times long past, and thought best forgotten.  A word that was never spoken when children were around.

_Gobblers_.


	7. Master James and I receive a summons

_Gobblers_.

Everyone had thought they'd disappeared for ever long before I was born.  It had been over thirty years since the last time.  Children had disappeared.  They were usually poor people's children, children who were left on their own a lot, who could be easily tempted by an offer of sweets, or an invitation to look at a new kitten, or to join a fix-up footy team.  The sort of kids who were taken to school and back every day, who had nurses or governesses or tutors watching over them all the time; they were safe.  It was just the poor people's kids who were in danger.

I was safe, of course.  The old Gobblers had only taken children whose daemons hadn't settled in their final forms.  My beautiful Viola had taken squirrel-form over two years ago.  

Mistress was frantic over Emily, who was only ten.  All the mothers in the neighbourhood set up special arrangements to watch over their children and escort them to and from school.  I felt sorry for the kids – locked indoors, looking sadly out of the windows at the sunlit streets and parks outside, getting bored and fed up and being shouted at by all the anxious grownups.  Mum told me that my baby brother Tom was running round the house driving everybody mad.

One Saturday in May I was climbing the stairs to the Professor's rooms when I met someone coming down towards me.  He was a small dark man wearing a donkey-jacket and a cloth cap.  He looked like a workman of some kind, and I wondered if he had been to Professor Belacqua's rooms to mend the plumbing, or put up a shelf or something like that.  So I was very surprised when he put up his hand and stopped me.

'Is you Peter?'

'Yes, I am.  What is it – what do you want?'

He ignored my questions.  'Peter, come down to the landing with us.'  His magpie-daemon flapped down the hallway over our heads and settled on the sill of the window which gave light to the landing below.

'Why?  I'm going to see Professor Belacqua.  I can't stop now.  I'll be late.'

The man looked at me.  I saw that his eyes were an extraordinary colour – a deep blue-violet, like a baby's.  'Lyra is not well.  Come down here and wait with us until she is feeling better.'

'No!'  I pushed past him, outraged.  This workman, or whatever he was, telling me what to do and calling the Professor by her Christian name!  How dare he!

I ran up the stairs and crashed through the Professor's door, hardly stopping to knock.  How I wish I hadn't.

Lyra – the Professor – was sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, weeping bitterly.   She was sobbing, each sob shaking her bodily as she sat.  Her daemon was wrapped around her neck, whispering in her ear.  He looked up and glared at me.  I looked around me wildly, hoping that the floor would swallow me up, or that magically the last ten seconds would un-happen.  But they didn't.

The Professor lifted her head and smiled sadly.  'Hello Peter.  I'm sorry, I'm not at my best today.'

At the door, the workman said, 'We is sorry, Lyra.  We tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen.  Thinks he knows best, little sod.'

'What do you know?' I retorted, but the Professor lifted her hand and hushed me.

'It's all right, Peter.  Mr Shire is an old friend of mine.

'Come back in Arthur, come in Sal.'

The man scowled at me, but pushed through the door and closed it tight shut behind him, his magpie-daemon following after.

'What we all need is a good cup of chai.'  The Professor got up from her seat and crossed over to her little kitchen.  Mr Shire stood in the doorway and I sat down in my usual place, feeling wretchedly uncomfortable.  Why was Professor Belacqua crying?  Was it something I'd done? (Such was my self-centredness.)

She returned with her usual tray and we drew up our chairs by the fireplace.

'I think we'd better tell him what's going on, don't you, Arthur?'

'Why?  What's the point?  It's nothing to do with him.'  Mr Shire clearly didn't think much of me.

'Peter may be an alethiometrist one day.  He'll have to ask difficult questions then; and face the answers too.

'It's the Gobblers, Peter.  They've come back…'

'I know.  They're keeping all the kids looked up indoors.'

'For their own good.'

'We thought it was all over.  We thought they was never coming back…' Mr Shire's voice trailed away.

Professor Belacqua leaned over and put her hand on his shoulder.  'I know,' she said softly, her face full of pity.

'Arthur – Mr Shire – once lost someone very precious to the Gobblers.'

I looked at them both.  There were things going one here – undercurrents – that I knew nothing of.  I waited.

'We wants to… we wants to kill her.'

'Revenge won't work, Arthur.  You may as well kill _me_.  I told you all that before.  Anyway, we don't know for sure that it _is_ her.'

My puzzlement must have shown in my face.  They were both talking in riddles.  Something was becoming clear – they had both known each other for a long time; unlikely though it seemed that a Professor of Jordan College would have anything to do with a common labourer.  I felt a brief flash of jealousy, and then had a sudden realisation.

'I've seen you before,' I said to the man.  'At Hythe Bridge Street, in January.  I was looking at your boats.  You told me to clear off!'

He looked at me more closely.  'So we did.  What was you doing there, anyway?'

'I was looking.  I grew up by the canal.  I like boats.'

'Does you?' and he sat back.  His magpie-daemon fixed a glinting eye on me, making me feel even more uncomfortable than ever.

The Professor passed me a biscuit and sat back too, looking up at the ceiling and speaking in a disconnected way, as if she didn't want to get too close to the subject in case it hurt her too much; as if the wounds had never properly healed and she had to be careful not to put the scars under too much tension.

She told me about the Gobblers – the first time they appeared, thirty or more years ago.  How children had been stolen, as they were being stolen now, and been taken to a place in the far north where horrible experiments had been carried out on then.  She used a word – _intercision_ – which I had never heard before.  I asked her what it meant, and she told me, and I gasped, and I thought I would stop breathing, possibly for ever.  It was as if that nightmare I told you about – the one where Viola was left behind – had come to life, crawling out of its hiding place under the wardrobe and creeping towards me over the bedroom floor, razor-claws extended, ready to slash me, clutch me to its foul bosom, and take me to its den to devour me.

Mr Shire saw my horror and his hard face softened a little.  He told me how he once lived in Limehouse, in London, and that his friend Maggie's (oh yes!  The boats' names – _Maggie_ and _Jimmy!_) younger brother Stan had been stolen by the Gobblers and taken to this awful Bolvangar place and he would have had his daemon _intercised _from him too, only that he and Maggie had gone there by Zeppelin and rescued him.

'Lyra was there, too,' he said.  'It was her that started the fire that burned the place down.'

'And it was gyptians like Arthur who rescued us.'

'And it was Maggie who disabled the chief Gobbler so we could all get away.'

I hardly dared ask the next question. 'What happened to Maggie?'

'She… died.  The chief Gobbler killed her.  It was her daemon did it.'  _A daemon killed a person?_

I never know when to stop.  'Who _was_ the chief Gobbler?'

The Professor looked at me, her face unreadable, holding Pan closely.

'She was my mother.'

They told me some, but I'm sure not all, of the rest of the story.  I found out more of it later on, but at the time it was as if… as if the ground had shifted under my feet and all the fixed points – the landmarks – had moved, so that I was not sure of anything any more.  Yes, I still worked for Master James, and read my study books, and kept an eye on Emily when Carrie wasn't looking after her, and I still made my weekly visits to the Professor.  But there were days when all the solid buildings and streets and citizens of Oxford turned into ghosts, wispy and unreal and transparent, and I seemed to walk down a road that was crowded with spectres.

It was only few weeks later that the letter arrived at the shop, passed on to Master James by the greasy Mr Cholmondley.

'This'll interest you,' said my master, showing me the note.  It read:

_THE BOREAL FOUNDATION_

_OXFORD_

_James and James_

_Shoe Lane_

_Oxford_

_Dear Sir,_

_Re.  Instrument repairs_

_Pursuant to your previous satisfactory work on the transvergence/attitude meter, we should be obliged if you would report to our Cropredy office at ten o'clock this Thursday 13th inst where you will receive further instructions._

_Yours faithfully,_

_ E. Morley (Miss)_

And that was where our adventures began in earnest.


	8. We pay a visit to the Boreal Foundation

I nearly soiled myself on the spot, to be honest.

I mean; The Boreal Foundation!  I might have guessed they were involved when we got paid so much for that first job we did for them.  And holding that crisply typed letter, on paper that was so thick it felt like the parchment my indentures are inscribed on, with its polite wording – "pursuant" and "obliged" – I had the sort of feeling you might get if you were invited to a levée at the Palace of Westminster.

In other words, it was to all intents and purposes a Royal Command.  Just because it didn't come from the Palace didn't mean you could choose not to obey it (or "oblige" them, as the note so respectfully put it).  The Boreal Foundation is as big as they come.

Put it this way: if Master James had ignored or rejected the note he would have said goodbye to his business.  The Boreals would have closed him down, either by telling all the people who depended on them (and that's a lot of people) not to use his services or buy from his shop any more; or they'd have set up another clockmaker's just down the road, selling at half Master James' prices.  After six months of that sort of competition he'd have gone bankrupt.

From the other point of view, though, it was fine.  Like I say, the Boreal Foundation is incredibly wealthy and they pay good money.  Master James had done a good job for them and they wanted to employ him again.  So long as he continued to do good work for them, he would continue to be well paid by them.  It was very simple – play along with them and prosper.  Oppose them, or fail to co-operate with them, and go bust.

It was a sort of slavery, I suppose, except that you could only feel the chains when you rattled them.  Better not to, really.

It was a beautiful day in early summer when Master James and I got off the shaky old country autobus at its stop by the cross on the Cropredy village green.  We were in good time.  There was no sense in upsetting our employers by arriving late.  Even so, the Boreal Foundation office was half a mile from the centre of the village, so we had a ten-minute walk along a gravel road, Master striding ahead and me following, carrying the small toolkit; the one we took out to jobs.  We had received no further details of the work they wanted us to do.

The so-called office turned out to be a medium-sized country house, walled into its grounds on three sides.  The fourth side sloped down to the Oxford-Banbury canal where there was a landing stage tucked in by the trees, visible from the entrance.  We had to identify ourselves to a guard in blue-and-gold Boreal livery at the gate.  He used a telephone (I'd seen very few telephones) to speak to someone in the house.  I overheard one side of the conversation.  It was to do with the fact that only Master James was expected, not me as well, so it took a bit of to-and-froing before the guard got the word to open the gate and let us through into the grounds.

'Follow that little path to the right.  You'll get to a door round the far side of the house.  There's a bell-push there.  Press hard and wait.'  The guard opened the gate and let us through.  I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, and hear his Doberman-daemon growling, as we walked down the path and around to the house's tradesman's entrance.

I noticed that the house had a very large conservatory built onto its northern wall, which seemed odd to me.  Wouldn't you put a conservatory where it could catch the sun?  There were a number of outbuildings, stables and staff accommodation and garages, I supposed (there was a private car of an unfamiliar make, quite big, parked at the front of the house).

Jim says that I should also tell you that the house was at least one hundred and fifty years old, ivy clad on the eastern wall, and built from creamy Cotswold limestone, which is, I suppose, all good stuff, and the kind of detail that an aspiring writer should include in his stories for his readers to chew on.  You can't tell, by the way, what most of the buildings in Oxford are made of; the covering of soot is so thick.

Master pressed hard on the bell-push as instructed and we stood and waited for an answer.  After a few minutes another uniformed flunky appeared and to my amazement put us though the same question-and-answer routine as we'd just gone though at the main gate.  After he had shut the door on us, and gone back into the house and asked whatever questions he had to ask, he came back with a big ledger and told us to sign our names in it.  Then he gave us paper badges to wear with our names at the bottom (where they belonged) and a big Boreal crest at the top (where it belonged).

We followed him down a short corridor and into an office, doing our best not to trip up on his terrier-daemon.  Viola was in the pocket of my pea-jacket all this time.  Nobody asked her to wear a paper badge.

The guard shut the office door behind us and the woman behind the desk pointed to a chair and told my master to sit down.  There was no chair for me, so I stood behind him with my back against the wall.

'Good morning, Master James.  I am Miss Morley.'  The woman's voice was brisk and clipped, with a funny accent that I couldn't quite place; so that I had no idea what part of the country she had come from.  She was the same sort of age as my master, in her early fifties, dressed in a neat suit of blue cloth (in a style that struck me as slightly unusual and unlike anything I'd seen.  I decided then that she wasn't from Brytain at all, but maybe from the Antipodes, where they behave and dress differently from us in the mother Country), and with waved grey hair.

In all these ways she was unusual, but not actually different from Master James, or me, or you for that matter (unless you're from Malacandra, the Warlike Planet, after all).  The difference, the real difference, lay in something else.  Her cat-formed daemon was curled up on the desk in front of her, licking its paws and whisking its tail from time to time.  At least, I supposed it was her daemon, and when I mentioned it to Master James on the autobus as we returned to Oxford that afternoon, he said, 'Of course it was her daemon, Peter.  What else could it have been?'

I wasn't so sure.  The cat-daemon behaved strangely, looking around and paying little attention to Miss Morley.  I've seen something like this before, especially with cat-daemons.  They behave like the animals whose form they've taken.  Independent, like.  Of course, they're as attached to their humans as any other form, when it comes down to it.

It was like this:  I wouldn't have been surprised if Miss Morley's daemon had flicked his tail, jumped off the desk and wandered out of the door and into the well-kept gardens that we could see from the office window.  And that Miss Morley wouldn't have noticed that this had happened.  That cat-daemon wasn't part of her at all, not in the real way that you or I would understand.

As this sunk into me, I began to feel more frightened than I have ever felt in my life.  This Miss Morley wasn't human at all.  She was a monster; perverted and unclean.  I wanted more than anything to get out of that office; to escape, to run down the newly-mown lawns and throw myself into the canal if needs be.  Anything but stay in that stuffy office, where my master and this alien woman sat discussing terms and periods of contract and retainers and fees and service level agreements.

Miss Morley looked up from the desk where she was showing Master where to sign his name on the papers that she had prepared for him.  'Your boy looks unwell,' she said.  True enough; I was sweating and shaking and fighting hard against an overwhelming urge to throw up all over the blue-and-gold carpet.  At her direction I stood by the window, gulping in the fresh air from outside and trying not to think about the terrible feeling of _wrongness_ that Miss Morley and her daemon were giving off, like a bad smell.

But, as I say, nobody else but me seemed to notice, or give any sign if they did.  Was it because they were older than me?  Or because whatever it was that allowed me to influence the needle of the alethiometer also made me more sensitive to things like that?  Or because they were all loyal Boreal Foundation employees and used to burying their disgust and fear in her presence?  Perhaps all three.

There was no actual work for us to do that day, so I'd carried Master's toolbag for nothing (except to prove that we could have done some work if we'd had to).

'That was a waste of time, Master,' I said, as we walked down the gravel road back to Cropredy.  Master James looked around anxiously and smiled uneasily, as if he though we might be overheard and should be sure to say the right thing.

'Not at all, Peter,' he said in a falsely cheerful voice, a bit too loud.  'We have negotiated an excellent support contract with a respected corporation.  They are paying us a handsome retainer.  We are very fortunate.'

I was, I must say, slightly ashamed of him, and for him.  Him, a master craftsman, well respected throughout the City of Oxford, and elsewhere too, having to watch his words as if he were a common worker, afraid of upsetting his employers and being sacked for saying the wrong thing.  That was the sort of thing that used to happen in the days of the Magisterium, when people spied on each other and reported their enemies to the Consistory Court of Discipline, to be carried off and tortured.  It was as if the old tyranny of the Church had been replaced by a new one, based on commerce.  And when had Master James negotiated anything with the Boreal Foundation?  He had signed ready-prepared papers.  There had been no negotiations of any kind.

That Saturday, I saw Professor Belacqua as usual.  My studies with her were going well – so well that she'd said that within the next month or two I might be ready to try my first simple reading with the alethiometer.  Once the tutorial was over – and they always left me exhausted – and we were sitting in our usual places by the fire, I mentioned the visit Master James and I had made to the Boreal Foundation office.  At once the Professor sat up in her chair, not even trying to hide her interest from me (although I was beginning to notice more and understand more of what was going on around me as my training proceeded).

'There was this strange woman there, Madam Professor.  I've never seen anyone like her before.'  I described the woman we had met and the way her daemon had seemed not to be part of her.  As I spoke, Professor Belacqua grew pale.  Pantalaimon looked at me with an intent stare.

'This daemon.  It was cat-formed, you say?'

'Yes, Madam Professor.'

'And you think it wasn't her daemon?'

'I don't think it was anyone's daemon, Madam Professor.  It was much more like an ordinary cat like a daemon.'

'Perhaps her real daemon was somewhere else.  It could have been small; concealed in her clothes.'  The Professor looked at Viola, where she sat in my lap.

'No, I don't think so.  I'm positive there was only Viola and my master's daemon in that office.'

'You're quite sure of this?'

'Yes, Madam Professor.'

Her eyes searched my face.  'Yes, Peter, I think you are. Oh…' She leaned back in her chair and sighed deeply.  'Oh, Peter, if what I fear is true, we are coming into evil times.  Did you happen to catch the woman's name?'

'Yes, Madam Professor.  It was Miss Morley.  Miss E. Morley.  It said her name on the letter.'

'Miss Morley… Peter, you're sure?'

'No mistake, Madam Professor.'

'She shouldn't be here… She can't be here.  Not in our world…' Professor Belacqua's eyes lost their focus.  She was detached from the world, from the everyday reality of her rooms in Jordan College.  She wasn't seeing me, I know.

There was a long pause, while she sat unmoving in her chair.  Then she shook herself and seemed to notice me, as if for the first time.

'Peter, there are things that I must do, and people I must talk to.'

'Mr Shire?'

'Yes, him, and others too.  Can you come here tomorrow evening? At eight?'

It would be tricky, but… 'Yes, of course, Madam Professor.'  I'd have to slip out, make some excuse if I was caught, and be back in time for lock-up.

A crystalline tear glittered in the corner of her eye.  I would have wiped it away if I'd dared.


	9. Our worst fears are confirmed

_They were witches_.

Yes, Jim, I heard you.  You're suggesting, aren't you, that Professor Belacqua and Miss Morley were both witches.  'It all adds up, doesn't it,' I heard you say.  'Funny stuff with daemons that aren't there when you expect them to be, or turn up when they shouldn't.'  Like the dream-Pantalaimon who must have been real after all.  Or Miss Morley's missing daemon.  'They were both of them witches all along!'

All right, I see your point.  Witch-daemons can wander about pretty much as they like. There's two things, though.  First, the last time I heard, witches were all at least four hundred years old and fabulously beautiful.  Miss Morley was certainly not fabulously beautiful (and why would she have a _fake_ daemon?) and Professor Belacqua, although she held my heart in her hand, was beautiful in a different sort of way.

The other thing is that it turned out that they weren't witches.  Neither of them.  You'll have to believe me for now, Jim.

We met, all of us, in Professor Belacqua's rooms the following night.   It felt like a conspiracy.  There was me, the Professor, Mr Shire and a younger man who was his partner on the boats.  No, not Stan, Maggie Tulliver's younger brother who I knew had once worked with Mr Shire.  He'd returned to the land and settled years before.  I only ever knew this man as Harry.

The Professor kicked off the proceedings:

'We're here because, except for Peter, we were all once at Bolvangar.  Peter knows something of what happened there.  He is someone I trust.'  I blushed.  'One day he may be a great alethiometrist.'  I blushed a deeper red.  '_If_ he continues his studies and pays attention to what I teach him,' she continued, mock-stern.

We talked for two hours.  I listened more than I talked, and I hope I learned something.  I heard names that I had not heard before – "Will" and "Kirjava" and "Mrs Coulter", who was the Professor's mother.  I learned that she had disappeared many years before, and nobody knew for sure what had happened to her, or to the Professor's father Lord Asriel (Lord Asriel!  There was a famous name from the past!)  but that Mr Shire had had a vision of her death, falling into a deep pit of darkness.  It seemed that the Professor believed this vision to be true and that Mr Shire was regarded as an oracle among his people.  Something of a mystic, too.

I heard another word – _Dust_.  That's right, with a capital D.  It didn't mean much to me at the time (that was to change) but the others thought that it was very important.  Oh yes, I remember there was one other name.  Elizabeth Boreal.  The Professor had had dealings with her, too.  By this stage, I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd told me that she'd been the Pope's mistress, or the King's; the way everything was expanding around me.  I felt as if, all my life, I'd been walking down narrow corridors, the walls close by and comforting and visible – nothing hidden, everything plainly in view – and suddenly the corridor had opened out into a vast cavern.  The walls, so to speak, were dark and distant, the ceiling hundreds of feet above me and, in the shadows… what?  There could be anything there, hiding, waiting.  Possibly hostile, possibly friendly.  Who could say?  I had a choice.  I could stop there, safe and warm, or turn back into the corridor.  Or I could walk out into the darkness of the great cave and explore it.

One day, if I'm spared, I may look back at that evening and say, 'That was it.  That was the moment when everything changed and I stopped being a boy and started to grow up.'  You might think that that's a funny thing for a fifteen years old clockmaker's apprentice to write down, but I've seen things and done things that nobody could possibly see and do without being changed by them.

I chose to go forward, into the unknown.  They asked me to make sure that when Master James was next summoned to Cropredy, I went with him.  I should look out for strange, _wrong_, things.

'What we fears is this,' said Mr Shire.  'We fears they is building a new Bolvangar there in Cropredy.  But we needs to be sure.'

'You'll be careful, Peter, won't you?' said the Professor, her pale blue eyes clouding over with concern for me.  'These people won't worry about the law, or right and wrong.'

'Be like us.'  That was Mr Shire.  'Unimportant.  Insignificant.  Invisible.  Nobody notices us little people.'

I've noticed that I've not said much about my work for a page or two.  You can be sure that ordinary life carried on as usual while we conspirators worried about what was going on inside the Boreal Foundation.  My next opportunity to do a bit of amateur detective work came up a couple of weeks later.

Master James and me were summoned to Cropredy just as before, by letter.  We took the autobus, got off at the green, walked up the gravel road and went through the same boring procedure at the gates.  There was no sign of Miss Morley this time round.  One of the security guards told us what we had to do.

Our task was to regulate the all the clocks in the house.  This sounds like an enormous job, but it was made simpler by the way the clocks worked.  Instead of having lots of clocks around the place, each of them needing to be wound up and adjusted, there was one master clock which was fixed to the wall in the room where they kept all the keys.  The house was all offices on the ground floor, you see.  This master clock had wires running from it to slave clocks in all the other rooms.  Anbaric impulses from this master clock went to all the slave clocks, along the wires, so that they all ticked (and tocked) together.  It was an odd feeling, to stand in a hallway and see the second hands of two clocks in two different rooms moving together, as if they were both part of one big clock, connected by wires instead of cogs and gears and spindles.  (Master told me afterwards that he had seen a similar arrangement in big government offices).

Master James cleaned, oiled and adjusted the master clock.  It was driven anbarically, too, but it had the same pendulum and escapement as a normal wind-up or weight-driven movement.  He checked it over and set it against his own pocket chronometer.  Then he closed its airtight case and stood back, satisfied with his work.  'That's fine, Peter,' he said, handing me back his tools to put away.  'Now we've got to set all the slaves right as well.'  He made me check my own watch against his chronometer.  'You take all the offices over there and the outbuildings.  I'll do the other side and upstairs.  See you back here in fifteen minutes.'

The slave clocks had been stopped while Master James worked on the master, so they were all slow, by half an hour or so.  My paper badge got me into all the offices and I had a fine time standing on people's desks, taking the clocks down from the walls and setting them, and trying not to look as if I was peering at their work (which I was).  Actually, it was all boring stuff – official letters and big ledgers full of columns of figures.  Fascinating, I'm sure, if you were interested in the way the Boreal Foundation did their business, but that wasn't what I was after.

When I'd finished with the offices I left the main house and crossed the yard to the brick outbuildings.  I'd seen cables slung from the house to the stables and guessed that there would be slave clocks out there too.  That was my excuse, anyway.

The first building contained, according to the sign on the door, the factor's office.  Sure enough, there was a clock in there and it was half an hour slow.

The second building…

I described it to the Professor later.  I trembled as I did so, even though I knew that her anger, fear and disgust were not aimed at me, but at the people who were doing such terrible things.

'It was an open space and it was lit by those new-fangled tubes.  They were very bright, the walls were all whitewashed and there was a shiny marble floor.  There wasn't anywhere you could hide in there, there was so much light.  On one side there was a set of double doors and that big car – you know, the one that was parked outside the first time we were there – was standing there.  I thought it must have been driven in and left, like it was in a garage.  I noticed that the boot was open and there were what looked like glass cylinders in it.  I wondered where they kept the luggage.

'Leading from the back of the car were a couple of thick cables.  Oh yes, I meant to say that some of the cylinders looked like they had something in them, like a yellow gas.  Or they were painted yellow.  It was hard to tell.'

The Professor nodded to me.  'I see.  Go on, Peter.'

'The cables went up to the ceiling where there was a metal frame they hung from.  They crossed over to the other side of the open space where they were joined to the… the thing that was there.'  I stopped.  I was gulping for air.

'Peter.  You must tell me everything.  Everything you saw.'

'It was… like you said it was in Bolvangar.  There were two cages, over tables, like you see in a hospital.  They were made of a silvery metal.  Cables, covered in black insulation, I suppose led from each cage to a… a guillotine.  It was set up between the cages.  The blade was pulled up to the top.  It was made of a silvery metal too, but it was cloudy as well.  Madam Professor, there were straps on the tables.  Were they for tying people down with?'

'Yes, Peter, they were.'

'I thought so.  There was blood, dried blood, on them.  On the tables and the cages.  They were too small for a grown-up.  They were for kids, I could tell.  They were for little kids.  Little kids…'

The Professor took out a lightly scented handkerchief and gently wiped the tears from my eyes, as I had so wanted to wipe them from hers before.  She was trembling as much as I was, and her Pantalaimon was nuzzling her neck, just as my Viola was comforting me.  Her lips were moving and I caught a few of the words – "Roger", and "Tony" and, again, "Will".

'I was tied to one of those slabs, once,' she said.  'I'll never forget it, the day they tried to take Pan away from me.  Did anything else happen?'

'Oh, not much.  A man burst in the side door and started shouting at me.  I looked as stupid as I could – which wasn't hard, the way I was feeling – and I just kept asking him where the clocks were.  He said there weren't any effing clocks, called me an effing idiot and told me to eff off quickly.  I think he was scared.  He'd left the door unlocked, and I'd got in, and if anyone found out he'd lose his job.'

'That sounds likely enough.'

'I found Master James in the house, and we signed out and went home.  He looked at me a bit oddly, and asked if I was feeling all right – which I obviously wasn't – and I said my stomach was feeling a bit dodgy.  Which was true enough, if not for the reason he supposed.'

'You've been very brave, Peter.'  The Professor kissed me on the cheek, her lips scarcely brushing against my skin.  'Sorry!' she cried, sitting back and grinning like a schoolgirl.  'I do believe I've embarrassed you!'

There were laws, I learned, left over from the days of the Magisterium, which banned theological research into Dust, or Rusakov particles, as they were known.  The Professor said that we could probably use those laws, not to mention the normal everyday laws against kidnapping and killing children ('Yes, Peter, they all died in the end, even the ones who clung on to life for a few days after the operation').  But it would take time, and while we were going to the police and getting a search warrant (assuming we could find a magistrate who would issue a search warrant for Boreal premises) the evidence would have been quietly removed and the whole hideous apparatus set up somewhere else.  Arthur Shire said it best:  'It's no good waiting.  We must go in and shut the bastards down ourselves.'

'I could try talking to Elizabeth…'

'No, Lyra.  It wouldn't work.  She'd deny it. We've only got Peter's evidence against her.'

'I'll talk to Will.'  Again, this mysterious Will, who I'd never met.

'You does that.  Meanwhile, we're going to get ourselves organised.  We're going to burn that damned place to the ground, and we doesn't care how many of those Boreal bastards are inside it when we does.  The more, the better.

'And if that sister of yours is in there too, so much the better…  The bitch can roast with the rest of them.'


	10. We pay another visit to the Boreal Found...

We made our attack that Sunday.

It was obvious from the start how we should go about it.  The house was defended on three sides by a high wall and the only entrance was the gate, which, for all we knew, was guarded day and night.  That left the fourth side, facing onto the canal.

Mr Shire spent the next few days talking to his gyptian friends.  Just like last time, the gyptians had been losing children to the Gobblers and it wasn't hard for him to get help and support for an assault on Cropredy.  He hadn't wanted to take me at first, but the Professor talked him round.

'How old were you when you went to Bolvangar, Arthur?'

'Fourteen, fifteen, something like that.  We've never been sure of our age.'

'I was two years younger than you.  Peter's the same age you were.'

'And I've seen the place.  I know where everything is.'

'All right, all right.  We won't argue.'  Very few people ever succeeding in arguing with Professor Belacqua, I noticed.

We left the _Jimmy_ at the Hythe Bridge Street basin when we set out on that Saturday morning.  I was on a weekend's leave, supposedly to visit my family, and I'd had to turn down offers to see me off at the autobus station.  

The _Maggie's_ cabin was tiny, so while Mr Shire, the Professor and me could fit in the cockpit, Harold and the twenty gyptian men that he'd recruited for the raid sat in the hold, hidden from view by the covers which usually protected the cargo from the weather.  They sat there, on the floor, holding their weapons – mostly knives and sticks, although I saw some pistols, a rifle or two, and what could have been a sawn-off shotgun.  They said little, but stared ahead, grim-faced.

If it hadn't been for the danger we were going into, I'd have enjoyed the trip.  Like I said, I grew up by the canal, so when we got to the first lock, at Wolvercote, I knew what to do.  Mr Shire looked on approvingly as we worked through the lock and afterwards he treated me more as a crew member than a passenger, giving me his spare lock key and sending me ahead on his creaky old bike to set the locks ready for us.  I was grateful for this – it gave me something to do.  I didn't envy the gyptians, sitting all day in the stuffy hold with nothing to do but wait.

We reached Kings Sutton that afternoon and moored up.  We could easily have got as far as Banbury, but the Professor and Mr Shire had agreed that it would have been dangerous to stop there, where Mr Shire was well known and a boatful of gyptians, rather than cargo, might have drawn attention to us.  It was likely, too, that some of the people who worked at the Boreal offices would live around there and might recognise me, unlikely though that seemed.

That night, Mr Shire and I bedded down with the gyptians in the hold, leaving the cabin to Professor Belacqua.

The next day, Sunday, we slipped through Banbury and moored up again by Cropredy lock.  The Boreal Foundation offices were only a mile or so further north.

Now that there was nothing for us to do but talk, re-check our weapons and wait, the tension really started to get to me.  I sat on the bank between the _Maggie_ and the towpath, looking up at the sky.  An occasional monoplane buzzed overhead, the trees rustled in the light wind.  I munched on a sandwich or sipped a cup of tea and watched while the sun slowly slid across the sky.  The murmur of Mr Shire's and Professor Belacqua's voices rose and fell behind me.  What an odd couple they were!  Him, dark and intense, wearing working clothes, rat-faced with heavy brows covering his intensely blue eyes.  She, fair and pale-skinned, dressed in a light floral skirt and a pale green blouse with her hair tied up behind with a blue ribbon.  I'm sure she caught me gazing at her, but each time she only smiled reassuringly, showing no sign that she had noticed.

We began the attack on the house at nine o'clock, as it was getting properly dark.  We had thought that there would be few people there and weren't expecting much resistance.  But from the start, it was clear that we had taken on a formidable enemy.  Mr Shire had moored the _Maggie_ at the stage in front of the house, and the gyptians had rolled up the tarpaulins which covered the hold and crept quietly onto the lawns that led up to the house.  We'd expected that we would be able to walk up to it and jemmy the doors to get inside; and all pretty much unobserved.

There must have been trip-alarms set, for as soon as we reached the grass a row of intensely brilliant lamps mounted on the roof of the house flooded the grounds with white light.  We all stood out against the darkness behind us like actor on a stage.

'Drop!' called out Harry, and we all fell to the ground.  Just in time, for a fusillade of shots rang out from the house.  A ground-floor window broke and the muzzle of what I later found out was a machine-gun poked itself though.  Seconds later, the air itself seemed to split open as a torrent of heavy bullets cracked and whined over our heads.  The gyptians started to fire back, those of them that had guns, and the crash of shattered glass added to the racket that was shattering the quiet of the evening.

Professor Belacqua – now wearing dark trousers and jacket – Mr Shire and I were at the right-hand side of our line.  Arthur turned to me.  'Get back to the boat!' he hissed.

'No.  Wait for the gun to stop.  We've got to get round to the back of the house.  That's where it is.'

'Let him stay, Arthur.  He knows where to go.'

'All right.'

The machine gun could only fire in brief bursts.  In the gaps between the groups of shots we crept along by the garden wall.  I heard a terrible scream behind me and turned to see one of our men writhing in dreadful pain on the lawn. He had taken a bullet in the shoulder and it had nearly torn his arm off.

We reached the house frightened, but unscathed.  The sounds of gunfire and shouting were screened to some extent by the body of the house.  'This way!' I said, leading the others around to the back yard where the outbuildings were.  A mighty crash to our left signalled that one of our shots had hit the conservatory.  I got to the far corner of the house first.

'Wait!'  I held up my hand.  A small group of Boreal guards were running from the gate around to the other side.  It was hard to tell in the darkness, but they looked well-armed and moved purposefully.  It was looking very bad for our friends out at the front.

The guards passed the opposite corner of the house, and I signalled to the Professor and Mr Shire to follow me across the yard.  The sounds of fighting still continued behind us.

The double doors of the outbuilding were open, much to my surprise.  Someone must have taken the big car out and only just returned, as it was parked there, with its nose facing the doors.  Light was streaming out from inside the building.  Carefully, knowing that there might be someone still inside, we slipped across the opening and into the garage, between the car and the wall.  We'd be safe there until whoever had brought the car back went to the house to see what was going on.  Or perhaps they'd already gone.

We stayed there for several minutes.  The sounds from the house were growing less and less.  Perhaps our men had retreated back to the canal.  Or maybe they had got into the house and the fighting was now hand-to-hand, deadly and silent.  We stood up.  I didn't have to point out the intercison apparatus to the Professor – she'd seen it before, in Bolvangar.  The blade was not raised up, as I'd seen it before, but resting all the way down.  _It's been used recently_, I thought, and my stomach lurched.

The sound of footsteps in the yard made us duck behind the car again.  I was at the back of the car by the boot, so I was able to see what was happening, although we could all hear well enough.  The woman, Miss Morley, was striding across the yard (I noticed that she wasn't bothering with her fake cat-daemon any more) pulling behind her a small boy who was screaming and writhing in her grip.  In her other hand she held a small pistol of an odd, liquid, shape.

She yanked the poor kid behind her and pulled him onto one of the slabs, smacking him hard on the side of the head with the butt of the pistol and knocking him out.  With a sickening dread in my heart I knew what she was intending to do.  She strapped the boy into place, scooped up his daemon, which was frantically, uselessly, changing form, from him with a metal net, and clamped the cage shut over his head.  Then she put the boy's daemon into the other cage and locked it.

There was no doubt at all that she was going to _intercise_ the boy and his daemon, separating the bond that linked them with the guillotine's silver blade.

What could we do?  The woman was armed and I was feeling dizzy with fear and horror at what was happening.  I was still trying to gather my thoughts together when the Professor stood up.

'Stop!' she cried out at the top of her voice.  Miss Morley looked round from the switch panel.  'I said, stop!'

Miss Morley never lost control of herself for a moment.  'Professor Belacqua.  What an unpleasant surprise.  Are you anything to do with all this unseemly commotion?'  She jerked her head towards the doors.  The sounds of fighting could still be heard coming from outside.

'Release that child!'

'No.  I need it for my own purposes.  You cannot prevent me.  Oh, and would you ask your companion to stand up, please?  He looks absolutely ridiculous, crouching down in that undignified manner.   And then could you both come out from behind the car where you have been skulking in that guilty manner and stand where I can see you?'  She waved the pistol.  'I am armed, as you can see.'

Who did she mean?  Which one of us had she missed?  Mr Shire or me?

Mr Shire stood up.  He muttered, 'She can't shoot us all at the same time.'  He and Professor Belacqua moved to the position that Miss Morley had indicated, on the other side of the car from me.

'Could you ask your gyptian friend to speak up, please?  I can't quite hear him.'

'I said, you is a cruel heartless bitch.'

'What an impolite little man you are.  I shall take it upon myself to teach you some manners.'  Miss Morley lifted the pistol and pulled the trigger.  Instead of the crack and whine of a bullet that I expected, there was a sizzling roar and a beam of violet incandescence sprang from the muzzle of the pistol.  Miss Morley carefully swung the light-beam across the wall over our heads, bringing down a shelf laden with paint and oil.  I could do nothing to avoid the cans and bottles as they scattered and burst around me.

'Next time, it'll be your neck.  In fact, I ought to kill you both now…' She appeared to think.  'No.  I'm leaving here shortly, once I've used this brat and his animal.  The guards will sort you two out.'  Miss Morley turned again to the panel.  A motor hummed and the guillotine blade started to rise, ready to descend and take the boy's life.

I realised that it was all down to me.  Miss Morley was facing us, waiting while the blade was wound up, ready to press the button that would release it and sever the boy from his daemon.  I was shaking with terror.  I didn't know what to do, so I did the only thing I could think of.  I shouted 'No!' and ran out from behind the car, ducking low and throwing myself at Miss Morley's legs.  I don't suppose she'd ever been football tackled in her life, and I had the advantage of surprise.  

All the same, she had the pistol and she used it.  The beam of light swept through the air over my head, leaving a sharp tang of burnt air behind it.  The Professor and Mr Shire dived for the floor.  As I caught Miss Morley's ankles and she fell back, the beam flashed out again, slicing through the roof.  A part of it came loose and crashed to the ground, catching me on the arm and grazing it.

Miss Morley's head banged against the control panel and I saw her eyes glaze over as she fell, concussed, against it.  To my horror, there came a sharp click from inside the panel and the blade, which had reached the top of its frame, started to fall.

Professor Belacqua screamed out loud, and Mr Shire leapt forward, but it was too late.  The blade fell into its socket with a lethal thump and the boy and his daemon (no longer _his_ daemon) twisted and arched their bodies, thrashing about in their bonds and moaning softly.

I couldn't help it – I vomited where I stood.  On the other side of the room, the inside of the car lit up with a bright orange glow.  Mr Shire took the pistol from Miss Morley's limp hand and held it to her head.

'No, Arthur.'

'What?'

'No.  Don't kill her.  Don't be like them.'

'She did it!  She did it to him!'

'I'm afraid it was my fault.  I knocked her hand against a switch.'

'No, Peter.  It was set to happen automatically.'  (Was that true?  I hope it was, but I didn't look at the controls at the time, and it's too late now).

Professor Belacqua released the boy, and the being which had once been his daemon, from their cages with such a look of sorrowful compassion on her face that neither Viola nor I could bear to see it.  She put the creature into the boy's hands, and he sat on the ground by the wall, cradling it in his arms, whispering to it but getting no reply.  Sick at heart, I turned to Mr Shire.  'Arthur?'  (At a time like this, correct etiquette seemed so pointless).

'Yes, Peter?'

'The gun.'  I pointed to the apparatus of horror in front of us.  He nodded gravely, pointed the pistol at the tables and guillotine, and used the beam to cut them up into pieces.  The molten metal ran in streams across the marble floor.

It was quiet outside.  What had happened in the battle?  He we won, or lost?  That didn't seem to matter either.  Nothing would matter to us ever again, it seemed; we were so drained of emotion.

'Peter.  Over here!'  It was the Professor, by the car.  Listlessly, I went over and joined her.  'What is it?'

'This is a very strange car.  I don't recognise any of the controls, or the instruments.  Arthur!  Come and have a look!' (I've worked out since what Lyra was doing – she was trying to keep us going; give us something to be interested in, something to think about that was nothing to do with that poor helpless boy, crying his heart out on the far side of the garage).

All three of us sat side by side on the front seat of the car and looked at the dashboard.  As the Professor had said, the dials and controls were unusual, like the rest of the car.  There was the steering tiller, as normal, and the elbow rests for the throttle and the clutch, but there was also… 'I know that!'  "That" was the meter that Master James and I had fixed.  It was mounted in the middle of the dashboard.  The dial marked "transvergence" was at the extreme blue end of its travel, and the "attitude" pointer was at zero.  Next to it was another meter, labelled "charge".  Its reading was at maximum.  Between them was a brass lever, with a red knob on the end.

You'll remember I told you that when I was a young boy I liked to take things apart and put them together again.  Like the kitchen clock at home, or the barometer?  It's a bad habit, I know, although it's part of what's made me so well suited for my trade, but I can never resist the urge to try things out, just to see what happens.  Master James had had to beat me several times (not harshly, just as a reminder) in the early days of my apprenticeship for "meddling".

That red knob was like a magnet to me.  Hardly knowing what I was doing, hardly knowing that I was doing it, I put out my right hand and pulled the lever.

It's hard to describe what happened next.  The view through the car's windscreen had been of the house, dark-windowed and silhouetted against the glare of the floodlights which were still shining down onto the lawns on the other side.  As I pulled the lever, the house _slid_ over to the left and then to the right, and then it seemed to squash itself up, or crease.  It was almost as if it had been a picture of a house, printed onto a balloon, and some huge someone was squeezing it.

Then the car began to spin – or the world outside did.  We clung onto the interior handles, feeling dizzy although the car didn't appear to be actually moving in any sense that we could understand.  I tried to lean forward and push the lever, to move it back, but either my arm had shrunk, or the dashboard was suddenly one hundred feet away.  Either way, I couldn't get to it.  I was still frantically trying to reach it when someone burst the balloon and everything became completely dark.

We could not see, hear, feel or speak.  We had no sense of time.  I've talked it over with the others, and it was just the same for them as for me.  It was as if someone, the Someone who was playing with the balloon, had flicked an anbaric switch and turned the world off.

So it was after only a fraction of a second, or as much as twenty million years, that the switch was flicked back.  And we were falling.  The car fell – I'd guess it fell about six feet – pushing my insides into my mouth, and landed with an almighty crash.  There was a sound of breaking glass from the boot.

Lyra (Look.  I've been calling her Professor all the way up to here, pretty much, but as I said a few pages back, the situation we were in was so far from anything I, at least, had seen before, that the strangeness had taken us over, as it were.  Titles and correct protocol and all that sort of thing were things that had nothing to do with what we were doing, so we put them aside.  We became (and we still are, in private) "Lyra" and "Arthur" and "Peter" to one another.) was the first to come to her senses.  The car's doors had sprung their locks when we crashed to earth, so she climbed gingerly out and looked around.  'It's all right,' she said. 'We're in a field.  Be careful.'

Arthur and I followed her out of the car.  We were indeed in a field, with shadowy sleeping cows all around us.  It was dark, with a few stars visible overhead.

'What shall we do?' I said, trying not to sound stupid.

'Do?'  Lyra, to my great surprise, grinned at me. 'Nothing!  We'll do nothing – until morning at any rate.  There's no point in us blundering around in the dark, stepping in cow-pats or walking into hedges.

'I'll sleep on the front seat.  You and Arthur can sort yourselves out in the back.'

She was so full of self-confidence (did she already, in some way, know what had happened to us and what _would_ happen?) that, despite our recent experiences, we did as we were told, like good little boys.  I stretched out on the back seat, and Arthur slept on the floor.  I woke once, but it was only Lyra talking in her sleep.

I was woken the following morning, not by the sun, but by a hammering on the car roof and a voice shouting.  I expected it was a farmer, wondering what the hell we were doing sleeping in a car in the middle of his cow pasture, but it was not.  It was a boy, about my age but not so tall as me, with dark hair and bushy eyebrows.

'Dad!  Dad!  Over here!  It's them!'

'Are you sure?'  An older man, dark-haired like his son, appeared in the window next to him, bumping hard against the side of the car and breathing heavily as though he had been running.  I sat up, just in time to see the look on his face; one I have never forgotten.

Lyra sat up too, in the front seat.  She shook her head – to clear it, I suppose – and wound down the window to speak to the newcomers.

'Will!  John!  About time too!  Where've you been?  What _have_ you been up to?'  She gave them both a dazzling smile; and burst into tears.


	11. I talk to John Parry

So this was Will…  The Will whom Lyra had only mentioned in passing.  I'd thought that was because he was someone she only knew casually; someone who was not important to her (or so I'd hoped).  Now I realised her apparent lack of interest meant the exact opposite of that, and just how much they meant to one another.

Lyra dabbed her face with her handkerchief, opened the door, and got out of the car, her feet squelching over the wet morning grass. Will had stepped back to give her room and was standing a few feet from the side of the car, his face frozen, his son John standing by his side.

A hush fell over us all, in that bright summer's morning with the newly risen sun shining through the trees at the edge of the field and the sleepy cows beginning to stir around us.  I couldn't see Lyra's face as she slowly walked over to Will.  I can't begin to imagine how she must have appeared to him.  A devil?  An angel?  Or something else altogether?

She stopped a foot in front of him and raised her right hand.  It was bunched up into a fist.  She drew it back and hit Will on the left shoulder, hard.  She struck him again and again and again.  He stood with his arms hanging down by his side, absorbing every blow, his face still impassive.

'I know how to make omelettes now.  I'm very good at it.'  _Thump.  Thump_. _Thump._  She was hitting him with both fists now, harder and harder.  'Shall I show you?  Shall I?'

Will found his voice, though it was little more than a croak.  'I wish you would.  I'd like to try one.'

'Peter!  You!'  It was Arthur.  'Come here!'  The boy ran round to the other side of the car, his cat-daemon in his arms, and we got out and joined him.

'Let's go for a little walk, shall we?'

We turned away from them then, not looking back, not wanting to see them (though I can imagine the scene in my mind's eye now, over and over again; the coming together, the embrace, the tears), not wanting to hear any of the things they said to each other (the softly spoken words), walking and walking and walking until we had crossed two fields and, all of a sudden, found ourselves standing by the towpath of the canal, facing the opposite bank.  With a low gurgling in its wake an early-starting boat passed us; a pleasure boat full of people on holiday, their children running up and down the deck and waving at us, mother at the tiller and father down below, cooking breakfast no doubt.

'Amateurs!' snorted Arthur.  We all laughed.

Will and Lyra found us sitting on the canal bank.  They were more composed, but with my heightened senses (for as I said, my alethiometry training included the development of my observational skills) I could tell that their meeting had been a thing both wonderful and terrible for them.  I shouldn't have known it, there was no reason why I should have even considered it, but it was instantly clear to me that their meeting, joyful and long-awaited as it was, contained its own nemesis within itself, as the best of men have the potential to do terrible deeds.

Their parting.

They would have to part again; I knew it as soon as I saw them, but I knew not how I knew.

While were waiting for Lyra and Will, Arthur, John and I had found that we had no wish to talk.  We were aware that something of great significance had happened – was happening – and words seemed wrong, somehow, like, oh, belching in the Oratory during Divine Observance.

Were they holding hands?  I can't remember.  I know that, in some way, an aura surrounded them, and it was a blessing to stand within sight of it.  Their daemons were running together by their feet as they crossed the field and joined us by the bank of the canal.  Their faces were animated – they radiated joy.  The air crackled with it.

'First things first.'  Will was a powerful-looking man and his voice was deep and resonant.  'Let's get that car out of sight.'

The car was stuck in the mud.  Its wheels were pushed up into the tops of their arches and I guessed that the car's undercarriage had been damaged by our inexplicable fall.  Not that that was the only inexplicable part of the situation we found ourselves in.  Where was the house?  And where were the garage, and Miss Morley, and that poor bereft boy?  How far had we travelled, while the universe had been, for all I knew, switched off?

Will had a rugged-looking vehicle with big wheels and a high ground clearance.  He drove it into the field from the lane beyond and attached a wire rope to the Boreal's car's front axle.  Will's own car must have been very powerful as, while making very little noise itself, it dragged the Boreal car, creaking and clanking, up the sloping field and onto the lane with no effort at all.

With Arthur at the tiller of Miss Morley's car and the rest of us standing by the side of the hedgerow Will towed it away into the distance, Lyra's eyes following him all the way.  He returned a few minutes later and leaned out of the open window.

'We've dumped it in the wood, a mile and a half down that way.'  He pointed.  'Towards Banbury.'

Banbury!  So, wherever we were, there was a place called Banbury.  Perhaps I could get used to being here after all.

After a while, I wasn't so sure.  Remember, Jim, that we'd had nothing to eat for hours and hours.  John took a packet of cheese sandwiches from a cubby-hole in the car's floor and passed them around, and we drank hot kaffee from mugs that were made of some warm flexible material – it wasn't delft, that's for sure.  I stood looking over the countryside around us and ate and drank gratefully.  Then we all piled into the car and drove off.

I've been on trains, and autobuses too, so I knew all about being driven about in wheeled vehicles.  But this was something else!  Will drove carefully enough, so far as I could tell.  What bothered me was just the _speed_ at which he drove, and the number and closeness of the other cars (all of them oddly shaped and brightly coloured) and the incredible size of the roads, much wider than they were at home.  It wasn't long before the motion of the vehicle was making me feel pretty queasy.

John tried to distract me from my discomfort by chatting to me as we drove along.  He introduced me to his Persian-daemon Rosalind and Viola said hello to him.  I noticed that he was wearing a silver earring in his left ear and asked him about it.  No boy I knew wore an earring – he would have been laughed at, or beaten up for being a queer.

'Oh, you mean my phone!  Yes, anybody can wear an earring if they want, but all my friends wear their phones in their ears.  It's so handy.'  I didn't understand what he was saying, so I let it drop.

The fields and hedges that had flown by us at first had given way to houses and manufactories, and eventually I could tell that we were approaching a big city.  To my horror, although the cars surrounding us were nearer and going faster than ever, Will took his hands off the car's controls and turned his seat around to face John, Arthur and me, where we sat in the back.  Lyra's seat spun round as well.

'We're on auto,' Will said, and smiled.  ('The car's driving itself.  Don't worry, we won't crash!' John said in my right ear.)

I should say that the car had a clock – a most peculiar clock, fitted in the roof above the windscreen.  It had no hands, just four green glowing numerals that changed with the time.  It read 08:13.  I wondered how it worked and where the mechanism was.

'We're about, oh, car, how far?'

'Eleven minutes from home.'  A pleasant female voice came from nowhere.

'Thank you, car.  Eleven minutes away, then.  I've called Judy and she's waiting for us.  In the meantime; welcome Arthur and Sal, Peter and Viola.  I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see you here in my world.  And Lyra and Pan too, of course.'  Lyra looked down and clasped his right hand in hers.  Beside me, John frowned.

'I need to tell you, Peter and Arthur especially, a few important things about this world that you have found yourself in.  Lyra's been here before, so she knows more about it than you do.

'First and most important – your daemons.  Fortunately, Sal and Viola have both taken forms that are common in this world.  That is fortunate, because you must keep them inconspicuous, or hidden.  _Most people here do not have daemons_. Rather, they do, but they are _internal_ daemons, and not visible.  I have Kirjava,' he stroked his beautiful cat-daemon's back, 'and John has his Rosalind, and Judy has her Skaven, in jackdaw-form.  We are very unusual in that respect.  I know only one other person in this world who is aware of her daemon, and you will be meeting her tomorrow.'

'Mary!'  Lyra cried out.  'You didn't tell me!'  I thought she was going to start hitting Will again.

'Let me keep some surprises back for you!'

The car drove itself into the garage of Will's house (not large, standing in a road of other houses very like it) and we filed out of it and through a door that led into the kitchen.  Will's wife Judy was there to meet us.

You know how it is when you have relatives to stay?  You're looking forward to seeing them, you like them, and you're going to enjoy having them around.  But, at the same time, there're worries and, that word again, undercurrents which, especially if you're a chap like me you pick up and which can spoil things, more or less.  I could tell straight away that Mrs Parry was determined to do her best to like Lyra, but there were many things that had happened in the past that made it difficult for her, and for Lyra too.

John tried to explain it to me later that day (or the day after) as we lay in his room with the lights out; him in his bed and me tucked into in a funny kind of cloth bag on a low mattress (they called it a "futon") on the floor next to it.

'Dad and Lyra; they met when they were younger than us, and then they had to separate from each other.  The way he talks about it, they had the most amazing adventures together, and they fell in love, (I knew that by then, but John's words still chilled my heart) but then they had to break up again, for the good of everyone, he says.  Having her turn up out of the blue like this is really giving Mum problems.  You do know that this is a different world from the one you were born in, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'They couldn't stay together, in the same world.  You can't – you die if you stay too long away from your home.

'It was around the time that Mum and Dad started going out together that somehow, they, Lyra and Dad I mean, found a way to talk to each other again, across the gap between the worlds.  It seems there'd been a promise made to them that, if they tried hard enough, they'd be able to do that.  I don't think Mum enjoys that much, either.   They talk in their sleep – it's like lucid dreaming, he says.

'There was something else, too.  They were all mixed up in – they won't tell me exactly how – the Culham Incident.'

'What was that?'

'It happened about the same time as everything else.  A fusion reactor near Oxford exploded, and they were quite close to it.  The way they tell it to us at school it was the most incredible thing.  It shouldn't have happened at all.  That sort of reactor shouldn't have been able to blow up like that.'

Like a lot of the things John Parry told me I only understood every third word he said – and that was when I was doing well…

'There was a lot of energy given off, but something else happened too.  The laws of the universe changed, just a little.'

'What?'

'Some numbers, physical constants they're called, changed.  Things that hadn't worked before, like fusion reactors, started working, although nobody had altered anything in their construction.  Some other things stopped working altogether.  There were people killed by faulty electronics – computers that crashed, that sort of thing.'

'I see.' (I didn't).

'What do you think they're talking about down there?'  Even though John's clock (more glowing figures, on the ceiling this time) said 02:33, we could hear the low hum of adult voices coming up from downstairs.

'Old times, I expect.  They're all pretty old, after all!'  _Even Lyra_.  I changed the subject quickly.

'What was that game we were playing?'

'Resident Evil XXIII?'

'I mean the one with all the, what-do-you-call-them, zombies.'

'That's it.'

'Can we have another go?'

'Of course.'  John threw me a headset and I clipped it to my temples as he'd shown me before.

'Game?'

'Yes John?'

'Savegame sixty-eight.  Engage!'

The virtual world that the games machine threw us into was no stranger than the one I was already in.  It was such a relief that it didn't matter the way real life did.


	12. We picnic on the Downs

It got a lot better the next day.

Stop, Jim.  I know what you're going to say.  I've jumped straight from arriving at the Parry's house in that funny car of theirs at nine in the morning to playing a game called Resident Evil with their son John at half past two the following day, without mentioning anything that happened in between.

There's a reason for that, and it's this.  Nothing happened in between.  That's right – nothing.  Unless you call sitting around in a house, keeping away from the windows and being unable to go out (although the weather was warm and bright) something worth using lots of chewy words (at a penny each) to describe.

All right, I'll try to tell you what was going on.  I ought to warn you that I didn't understand all of it myself (I've said that before, haven't I) so how I'm going to explain it to you, I don't know.

It was all down to the phones (like John's earring).  We didn't have them.  Naturally.  What they were was like the telephones you sometimes see in big offices, or law courts – you know, there's an earpiece you hold to your ear and a trumpet you talk into and wires that connect you to the somebody you're speaking to and he's got the same sort of thing at his end so you can both talk and listen at the same time.  There were telephones at the Boreal office in Cropredy.

These phones that John and his friends and, so far as I could tell, everybody in that world had were like that – you could talk to other people with them, I mean – but they were more like part of the people than something they used.  The way John explained it, your phone was keyed to your DNA (whatever that was, and we didn't have any – not the right sort anyway) so it only worked for you, and nobody else could use it.  Even if I'd clipped John's phone to my ear (and I'd have died of shame if I'd been seen wearing an earring) it wouldn't have let me talk to anyone else.

That wasn't so bad.  I mean; who else did I want to talk to?  The trouble was that if you didn't have a phone you weren't a person.  No, really.  You couldn't buy anything, because the phones had, in some way I never comprehended, your money inside them. There were no coins, so the Parrys couldn't lend us any money.  It got worse.  We couldn't go out of the house, because there were anbaric monitors looking for criminals in the streets.  If we'd been found wandering about without phones we'd have been arrested.  The way they put it, only robbers and looters and people up to no good went about without their phones.

Just to add to the fun, the house didn't want us to be in it at all.  The mechanisms in the house would only work for you if you were one of the people who lived there.  Those phones, again.  This was supposed to stop their stuff being pinched, or squatters moving in.  If you didn't have a phone, or it didn't think you ought to be living in it, the house refused to look after you. What's that you say, Jim?  What about visitors?  Apparently you had to tell the house that it was all right for them to be there, and it checked their – wait for it – phones and added them to its list of approved residents.

John said later that we were lucky the house hadn't tried to kill us.  'The daemons confuse it, so we had the security turned right down.'

None of this would have mattered so much if the Parrys had been in the house with us, but they weren't.  It was Monday morning – Will Parry was a doctor and he had a practise to go to,  John was at school and Judy was working somewhere in town.  She was a nurse at a place called Frenchay Hospital.

So, although the house was full of amazing things, we couldn't use them.  We couldn't even open the cold cupboard to get something to eat.  If Mrs Parry hadn't left us out some bread (funny pappy white stuff), we'd have starved.

We kept away from the windows and talked about things.  There wasn't much conversation, I'm afraid.  Lyra was in a world of her own.  Dazed would be the right word for it.  She and Pan occupied the couch and seemed to be in a trance most of the time.  Arthur and Sal were very restless – walking up and down the sitting room, muttering to themselves.  They had been badly affected by the sight of the boy who was intercised.  We all were; but I think Arthur blamed himself for not preventing it.  He kept that horrible cloth cap on, even indoors.  Perhaps he was losing his hair?  I never saw him without something on his head.

As for Viola and me, we (at John's suggestion, before he dashed off – late – for school) read a book called _The Collected Works of William Shakespeare_.  Not all of it – it was enormous, like a Bible.  They let me take it home with me and keep it.  I'll show it to you one day, Jim.  'Everything's in that book,' John said.  'Everything that anyone's ever done, or thought, or felt, is in that book.'

It was full of plays and poems, written in a language that was sometimes strange and old-fashioned (but never hard to read).  To be honest; when I think of what's in that book and look at this rubbish I'm writing here, I feel like throwing my pen away and giving up.  But I'll never give up the book.

Never mind; and we had a good laugh when we got to the play called _As You Like It_ (thanks, John).  And an even bigger laugh from _Twelfth Night_.

After we'd suffered six hours of imprisonment in the Parry's house, John turned up, home from school.  The house cheered up straight away (it was as if the house was a person, and missing its friends).  Lots of little red and green lights turned on and, in some way that's completely beyond me, the sitting room walls disappeared and we found ourselves standing high up on the side of a mountain, with a view across a green meadowed valley, with a village nestling in the bottom to white peaks soaring high into the sky in the hazed distance.  'My favourite view,' said John, making us cups of Indian tea and offering us a plate of little chocolate and orange cakes before settling down to do his homework (no change there, then.  Some things are the same wherever you go, and that includes school homework).

You guessed it. He did his homework with his phone.

That evening, after Will and Judy had returned from their work, I thought we would have some sort of meeting and work out what we were going to do next.  But no.  We were waiting for this Mary person that Will had mentioned before.  We ate and sat and watched a moving photogram that they called the TV.  I hated it.  Not the TV – that was fun, although as usual I didn't understand much of it – but the atmosphere.  Judy seized a place on the couch next to Will and sat very close to him, with Kirjava on her lap.  She didn't actually glare at Lyra, or snap at her, but you could see that she was _defending_ Will from her; I suppose you'd have to say.  Lyra sat on a chair by herself, stroking Pantalaimon incessantly and looking blank.  Arthur and Sal just carried on muttering.

By the time it got to nine o'clock I'd had about enough of this, and so had John.  We went upstairs to his room and played games and talked about our different worlds and our different (but in many ways very similar) lives.

And that's where I left you.  Someone downstairs must have said something that broke the ice – or perhaps they opened a bottle of wine – because they eventually started talking. Maybe Judy Parry relaxed after a while.  I hope so.  I liked her, but I hardly ever saw her looking happy.  No; but when you think of it there must have been something about her that had made Will want to marry her.  I just never saw it.

Will and Judy had made arrangements to stay away from work on Tuesday (there hadn't been enough time on Monday, John said).  John did something to his phone (he held it under hot water, I think) to convince it that he had a fever and to get him excused school for the day.  So we all went for a picnic.

It was on a place called the Downs, overlooking a deep river gorge, where a spidery suspension bridge (very old, John said) leapt from our side of the river to the other.  The car drove us up there (it only took fifteen minutes) dropped us off with our things, and drove itself back home again.  Will or Judy would call for it when it was needed.

It was such a relief to be out in the open air again!  The sky was a wide blue-and-white dome stretched over our heads; from Cymru over to the west to Aquae Sulis to the east.   A gentle breeze kept the leaves on the trees moving and ourselves from getting too hot.

Again, I'd been expecting that we would all sit down on the grass and make this big plan to sort out the Boreals and shut down their horrible operations.  But nothing like that happened.  Instead, we strolled about in twos and threes, safe from observation by the monitors, and talked to each other as and when we met.  Arthur and I spent some time on the edge of the gorge, looking down to the Avon river, far below.

'The Kennet and Avon.  It's a fine canal, but hard work to navigate,' he said.  We talked about Bolvangar – I wanted to – and I learned more about what had happened there.  He looked at me with his intensely blue eyes. 'We changed there.   We was changed.'

'Is it true that you're an oracle?  That you have power over Dust?'  Lyra had told me that Arthur was the greatest seer among the gyptian folk, but that there was more to it than that.

'Yes, it's true.  As for the Dust – nobody has power over it.  But we sees it, and we talks to it sometimes and we can see it in people, too.'

'Dust is in people?'

'Yes, else they wouldn't _be_ people.'

'Can you see it in me?'

'It's tricky, out here in the sunshine, but yes, we can.'

'And Lyra?'

'Of course.'  He paused.  'Peter…' Sal looked at me, from her place on Arthur's shoulder.  'It's hard for her.  Don't make it worse.'

'What do you mean?'

'You know.  We sees that in you, too.'

'But…'

'We knows.  We sees it.

'You has a choice, Peter.'  Arthur's face was as kindly and concerned as I'd ever seen it.  'We knows what you is feeling for Lyra.  We knows how terrible Judy is feeling.  We sees that too.

'It's never going to be easy for Lyra and Will.  It's not fair; but there it is.  You knows.'

I looked away.  'Yes.'

'The kindest thing is to let them have their time together now.  It'll only be for another day or so.  Then we'll all have go back.'

'Go back?  Why?'

'It's this world.  It's wrong for you and me and her.   We feels it.  We can't live long here.

'I can't feel anything.'

'But you're not us.'

'No, but…' I could feel the tears starting in my eyes.  'When you say I've got a choice, you mean I mustn't tell her how I…' I must have looked desperate, for Arthur reached over to me and held me in both arms.

'No. Don't make her have to send you away.  It would hurt her – and you – too much.'

I gazed to westwards, over the gorge.  The sounds of cars and boats two hundred feet below were carried up towards us by the gentle wind, scented by its passage over the open country beyond.

'You must be Arthur and Peter.'  A grey-haired woman, solid and friendly-faced was coming across the grass towards us, holding a small wickerwork box.  John Parry was with her.

'This is Aunt Mary,' he said, producing a gingham cloth and spreading out on the ground.  Arthur held out his hand and bowed slightly.  'Doctor Malone, we is honoured.'  Her alpine chough daemon fluttered his wings.

'Call me Mary, please.'

'Aunt Mary was involved with Dad and Lyra in the old days,' John said.  'She's really clever.  Ask her anything you like.'

'Was clever.  I'm superannuated now!'  Mary laughed, a robust chortle (that's a word John taught me).  I liked her straight away.  She produced pies, salad and beer from the box and we tucked in.  We talked between mouthfuls.

'I'm sure,' said Mary, ' from what Lyra's told me today that the vehicle you came here in was powered by Dust.  Peter, you're mechanically-minded.  Can you tell me how the car was put together?'

'It was dark most of the time, but...' and I described the car's unusual instruments, and the glass cylinders I'd seen in the boot.  'It flashed yellow-gold when the boy was…'

'Sorry, Peter.  It's painful, I know.  I think the glass cylinders are a Rusakov Accumulator.  They collected the Dust that was released when that poor child was intercised.'

I remembered the crash when the car fell.  'I think they may have been broken when we came here.  Why did the car drop so far when it entered this world?  Shouldn't the ground have been in the same place here as there?'

'The worlds were never perfectly aligned, Peter.  It could have been worse.  Suppose you'd come out underground!'

_We'd have been buried alive_.  I shuddered.

'We need to get you two and Lyra back home.  There's another thing.  The woman who shot at you.  Miss Morley.'  Mary looked grim.  'I've met her. She's a…'

'She's from this world!' I almost shouted it.  'That's why she had a fake daemon!'

'Oh yes, Peter.  She's stuck over there, and it serves her right.  She's a nasty piece of work.  All the same, we ought to try to get her back here.  The Latrom Corporation will be looking for her.'

'The Latrom Corporation?'

'They're the twin of the Boreal Foundation in your world.  They're not as powerful as the Boreals, but they have _connections_ and they'll be on our trail soon.  We're sure that the Boreals in your world can communicate with the Latroms over here.  There's a device called the lodestone resonator that they can use.  It's not as effective as Will's and Lyra's dream-state, but it's quite good enough.  Miss Morley will alert them to our presence here, you can be sure of that.'

'Why don't we stay here?  Leave her stuck there?'

'Too many reasons, Peter.  You'll die in two years or so if you stay here.  This world is too alien to your daemon.  Since the Culham Incident and the destruction of the Subtle Knife, which altered, or, I think, restored, the physical makeup of the universes, it's become easier, I think, to travel between the worlds.  The barriers are a little lower.  I don't think the Boreal's vehicle would have worked before Culham, for example.

'The worlds have converged a little, but not enough to make it possible for people from one world to live a full life in another.  There's still considerable transvergence between them.'

'The Subtle Knife?  What's that?'  It took a while for Mary to explain that one to me.  There was a lot of history involved.  I'll tell you all about it some other time, Jim.  It certainly explained Will Parry's missing fingers.

I saw them briefly; heads together, hands interlinked, bodies pressed close to one another, walking slowly through the trees near the gorge's edge.  I blinked, and caught a brief vision of Dust, streaming down from the sky and enveloping them in golden swirls of light. 'Come away,' whispered Viola, so we did.

Later I found Judy Parry sitting red-eyed on a tartan rug some distance off and sat next to her in silence for a while.  She didn't come with us when we left Bristol for Cropredy that evening.


	13. We gather Dust

There were a number of important questions that we needed to get answers to.  We stopped somewhere outside Banbury and Lyra took out the alethiometer from its velvet travelling pouch.  The car turned its lights on, and we clustered round the instrument.

Question one – How many travellers from Lyra and Peter's world are now in this one?

Answer – Three.  That was a relief, because it answered two questions in one.  Were there any Boreal people in this world?  No, so Miss Morley hadn't got back here and she didn't have any Boreal agents here.  Latrom people were a different matter.  We could not be sure that they had not been told about us and were maybe following us now.

The other point was this:  Mary said that, if she were Miss Morley, she would set up another intercisor in this world, and carry one or more children and their daemons here from mine, just in case, as Mary put it, she needed to "recharge" the car with Dust.  Children in this world wouldn't have daemons that could be separated by intercison, so she would have to bring one or two with her.  Of course, they'd die after a year or two even if they weren't used, so she'd have to bring more over as time passed.

I'm glad I can't think up ideas like that.

Question two – is the Boreal car the only means that is presently available for crossing physically between the worlds?

Answer – Yes.  That was another relief.  Miss Morley was still trapped in our world, then.

The next question was not put to the alethiometer.

Question three – what shall we do with Miss Morley's gun?

There was no simple answer to that.  Mary had a close look at it.  'It's an energy weapon, but that's all I can tell by just looking.  I don't want to try dismantling it – it might be booby-trapped.

'It's certainly not come from Lyra's world; it's much too technically advanced for that.  For a start, the casing is made of plastic, and there's no such thing as plastic where you three come from.  So; it's either from here, or possibly it's a leftover from the War in Heaven and not from this world at all.

'Either way, I don't think you should take it back with you.  It's a _twonky_.  It doesn't belong in your world.

That was a great relief to me.  I hated the thing.  I hated its random power; the way it amplified Miss Morley's hatred into an irresistible evil force. 

'I says we takes it.'  That was Arthur.

'Why?'

'Because when we gets back I want to cut that car into as many pieces as we can.  We can destroy the gun afterwards.'

Lyra spoke. 'I agree.  Then we must bury it, or throw it in the canal.'

'I don't like it.  These sorts of things have the nasty habit of not staying lost.'

'I trust Arthur in this.'  So it was agreed.

The car drove off again.  Cropredy was only a few minutes away.

Will's car stopped in the road and we all climbed down the hill into the wood where he had dumped the Boreal's vehicle two days ago.

We had a big problem with that car.  How could we be sure that we would come out in the right place in our world?  Not underground, or a hundred feet in the air?  In the end we decided to tow it to the canal side and travel to our world from there.  It wasn't certain that even that would be safe, but it was the nearest thing to a fixed reference point we had.

Actually, that wasn't the only problem.  Remember the crashing sound when we landed in Will's world?  That was the Rusakov Accumulator smashing, that was.

Mary looked grimly at the broken glass in the boot.  At least half the cylinders were broken, and none of the intact ones contained the slightest trace of Dust.

'It's likely that Miss Morley would've charged it up with enough Dust to carry her here and still leave enough power left over to take her back to your world,' she said, looking at Lyra.  'Otherwise she'd have had to wait until another vehicle was built in your world and sent here before she could get back there.  As she was probably intending to use the car to escape from the gyptian attack, (I'd forgotten about that.  What was the state of affairs at home?  Had our assault succeeded?) we can assume that she had either charged it up fully or was going to sacrifice another child before she left.

'Either way, we've got a problem.'  She pointed the portable light she was holding at the far end of the luggage compartment. 'I think there are enough unbroken cells that I can reassemble the Accumulator.  Half of it, anyway, so there'll be enough capacity to take you home, I hope.  It's simple enough – just a question of reconnecting the intact cylinders.

'But that's no good without the Dust to make it work.'

She looked around us.  'Sorry.  I don't do miracles.  I'm only a scientist.'

We fell silent.  Ask the alethiometer, I thought, but Lyra made no move.  The trees clustered around us like the bars of a prison.  Would we have to stay here for ever?  Live here, as non-people, with no DNA and no phones and no money?  Die here, only two years from now?

All these thoughts were whizzing about inside my head.  I looked to Lyra to see if she had any ideas, but she was standing next to Will and looking at him, not me.

After an eternity, Arthur spoke. 'There's six of us here.  There might be a chance.'

'A chance of what?'

'A chance that we can, between us, gather together enough Dust to make this thing work.'  He pointed to the car.

'Gather?'  That was Lyra.

'No.  Not gather.  We doesn't mean that.  What we means is that if each of us gives up some of the Dust that… that makes us people, not things, we might be able to collect enough to make this car go, so it can take us home; and do it without killing us, or making us like those Bolvangar kids.'

Will: 'You mean – give our own Dust?'

'Yes.'

'Then there're only five of us, not six.  I'm not letting John do this.  It's much too dangerous.'

'Dad!'

'I mean it, John.'

'No!  You can't stop me.  What if five of us isn't enough?  What if five _is_ enough, but only if some of us die?  You've got to let me help!'

They argued fiercely for some minutes, while the rest of us looked away.  It wasn't our fight.  But, eventually…

'His grandfather was just the same.  You couldn't make him see sense – he'd always do what he thought was right, whatever it cost him.'  Will smiled ruefully.

'Jopari was a great man.  He saved our lives so often.  Him, and Lee…' Lyra's voice trailed away, and I could see the glint of tears on her cheek.

We decided not to try to move the car after all.  It was too risky; we might break more of the cylinders, or dislodge them.  We'd have to take our chances here in the wood.

John took out a small canvas bag from the back of his father's car and gave it to me.  'There are a few things in there you might like.  Aunt Mary'd call them _twonkies_, so you'd better not let her, or anyone else, see them until you get home.

'Good luck, Peter.'

'Thanks, John.  Gosh, I wish you were coming with us!  There's so much I'd like to show you.'

'I wish I was coming.  Dad's told me lots about your world, but I'd love to see it all for myself.'  John thumped my shoulder and I belted him one back.

Damn it.  I wish we'd had the time to become proper mates.

We formed a broken circle, around the back of the Boreal's car.  John first; standing next to the car's left side (Arthur called it the _Port_ side), then me, then Lyra, then Will, then Mary and last Arthur by the other side of the vehicle.  Our daemons made up another circle in the middle, each touching the one next to him or her, just as we humans were.  It was a shock when Arthur told us we had to let them do this, as I'm sure you can imagine, Jim.  It should have been wrong, immoral, but it wasn't.  Not then, or there.  It was in another world, you see, so when Viola came into contact with Pantalaimon, what would – if it had happened at home – have been a declaration of love, became a gesture of friendship and hope instead.

Mary had rebuilt the Accumulator as best she could ('it's a ramshackle thing!') and connected it into the car.  We had to hope that nothing else had been damaged in its fall.

We held hands in our circle and waited.  Arthur stood stock-still, his eyes catching the light from Mary's torch and reflecting deep sapphire-blue back to us.  He entered a deep trance, which as the seconds and minutes passed, spread out to us, casting a feeling of calm peace over us all.  Slowly, I became aware that the torch was becoming dimmer, fading as its power ran down.

Or was it?  Or was it the yellow-gold glow that was settling on us, like snow on the gardens and rooftops of home, and drowning out the gleam of the torch in its own hazy radiance?   I couldn't move my head – I don't know how it was that I could still breathe – so I don't know whether the sparkling streamers of golden mist that swirled around Mary and Arthur were also attracted to, or given off by, me and John as well.  I hope so.  Arthur told me later that Will and Lyra had blazed with a greater luminosity than he would have thought possible.  'We didn't believe it, Peter.  They could have done it by themselves – just the two of them.  That much energy!  It would have killed the likes of you and us.'

Our daemons were also shining more and more brightly as the timeless minutes passed and the dome of yellow light in which we were standing grew and expanded about our heads.  Greater and greater, brighter and brighter, until Arthur lifted both his hands above his head and, with a clearly audible _swoosh_ the Dust-cloud in which we were standing was gathered up into a swirling tornado of light which suddenly inverted itself and poured into the glass cylinders in the boot of the Boreal car, flooding them with glowing motes of living light.

Arthur leaned forward and shut the boot lid.  Then he collapsed onto the ground.  Lyra and Mary rushed to his side, looking worried.  How they were able to move so quickly, I don't know.  I felt utterly exhausted and drained of all my strength.

Mary fanned Arthur's face with her hand and Lyra lifted his head.  Sal lay on her side on the ground, with rigid unmoving wings.  I watched her in agony, waiting for her to flicker and disappear in death.  It had crept up on me without my realising it – I had become very fond indeed of this harsh and battered, kind and loving, dark little man.

Arthur shook his head and his eyes opened slowly. 'Bugger me!  That's the last time we tries channelling that much Dust!'  He grinned.  'It worked, didn't it?'

'Yes, Arthur, it worked.'

'Told you it would.'  We helped him into the front passenger seat of the Boreal's car.  Its broken springs creaked as he sat down and it slipped a little further down the slope, wedging itself solidly against a birch tree.

'This is it, then.'

'Yes.  This is it.  Again.'

'I'll see you in my dreams.'

'Don't you dare be late.'

I don't think any of us had meant to be there when Lyra and Will parted, but we were and they couldn't very well tell us to go away and leave them in peace, and so they had to make do with a tender kiss and a hand on each other's arm for a brief moment before Lyra got into the back of the car.  Her eyes never left his face; I saw that.

'Goodbye, Will.  Goodbye, Mary.  Goodbye, John.'

'Goodbye, Peter.'

I slipped into the driver's seat.  I'd got us here, with my meddling.  It was only fair that I should take us back again.

'All daemons aboard and safe?'  Just like an autobus driver!

'Safe!'

'Safe!'

'I'm here, Peter.'

There was no point in checking the meters and gauges on the dashboard.  The car was either going to work or it wasn't.

I'd pulled on the brass lever to bring us here.  So this time I pushed it.


	14. In the gyptian cottage

I'm here now, telling you this story, so you know we got back.

The universe did its turn-itself-inside-out trick and I felt sicker than ever as a result, but after spending another twenty lifetimes – or was it one heartbeat – in non-space and non-time the real world appeared again outside the car.

Actually, it appeared _inside_ the car, too.  We rematerialised (now, _there's_ a word that's worth its penny) in a wood very similar to the one we'd left in Will and John's world.  And one of the trees suddenly appeared in the middle of the car, poking up through the floor, passing less than an inch from my neck and fitting exactly in the hole that it had made in the roof.  Little blue sparks were chasing each other up and down the trunk.

Holy bloody Magdelena! A little further over to the left or the right and that tree would have been inside one of us…

Where Lyra  found the energy and the will power to do what she did next, I don't know.

'Come on, chaps!'  Lyra opened the door and stepped lightly out of the car, as if she hadn't just said goodbye to the greatest love she'd ever known (I knew where I stood now) and given of her precious Dust – her life-force – to make sure that we got home safely.

'Arthur!  Where do you think we are?'  Arthur was still dazed, as I was, but he got out of the car, rather less quickly than Lyra, and I followed him.

'Somewhere near the canal, we supposes.'

'We'd better go carefully then, if we don't want to fall in and drown.  That's be a silly way to go, wouldn't it?  After all we've been through.'

I never thought I'd hear Lyra prattle, but she kept talking – about nothing, really – as Arthur and I got our bearings, looking about ourselves in the darkness of the midnight wood.

'Can't see a thing,' Arthur grumbled.

'Use the gun,' I said.  'That'll give us some light to see by.'

'It's high time we got rid of that car, too.'

'What about Miss Morley?' I said.  'How's she going to get home if we destroy the car?'

'She can bloody well walk.'

Arthur took the gun from his pocket.  It was tiny; only three or four inches long and, to be honest, I'd have taken it for a kid's toy if I hadn't seen what it could do.  How could something so small be so full of power?  It was a hateful object, as I've said already.

'Stand back!'  We all stood several yards off.  I thought it would be best if I put a sizeable tree between me and the car so I did.  That was definitely a good idea.  Arthur held the gun at arm's length and pointed it at the car.  He pulled the trigger and a blinding pencil of incandescent light leapt from the gun.   Arthur swept the beam from left to right, moving up and down.  The car flashed into molten metal where the energy from the beam brushed against it, and behind it, for its bodywork scarcely obstructed the ray of burning light, the trees began to flash into flame.

The sound of collapsing metal and tortured air (for the beam _buzzed_ as it passed and gave off a sharp metallic odour that I could taste in the back of my mouth) was getting louder and louder, but it wasn't long before it began to be drowned out by the crackle and roar of burning wood as the birch trees, readily combustible after a dry winter and spring, blazed ever brighter behind the fallen silhouette of the car.

The anbaric (I suppose the gun was powered anbarically) beam suddenly ceased.

'Bugger it!' cried Arthur.  The gun had become so hot that he'd dropped it.  We fumbled about by his feet and picked it up gingerly.  Just in time, too, for the brown leaves it had fallen onto were beginning to smoulder.  'Watch out!'  A tree creaked and leaned, then fell, leaves outlined in fire, across the ruined car, just missing us.  We needed no further warning, but turned and ran up the hill away from the wood.

We reached the top of the hill and turned, panting, to see how much damage we had done.  Below us the wood, though it was so small that copse would have been a better word to describe it, was well ablaze.  Arthur gave a satisfied nod.  'That's sorted the bastards,' he said, and Sal pecked him on the neck.  We looked around us.  In the distance we could see the silvery sheen of water lit up by the moon.  We supposed that must be the canal, so somewhere nearby we might expect to find the Boreal's house and the village of Cropredy.

Our position was a difficult one.  There we were, in the middle of the countryside, in the middle of the night, with no good reason for being there.  Only two days ago, the nearby offices of a powerful organisation – the Boreal Foundation – had been attacked by gyptians.  There was no way that we could disguise Arthur's gyptian appearance.  Even Lyra's status as a full Professor of Jordan College, Oxford, wouldn't help us if agents of the Foundation found us, isolated and alone, in the woods and fields.

We could find our way down to the canal, in the hope of finding gyptians there.  The chances were, however, that every gyptian for miles around had been taken in for questioning.  We could go to the village of Cropredy, but, as Lyra said, probably everyone who lived there worked for, or depended on the Boreals and would report us to them.  We could stay where we were, but it was cold, and the fire in the copse would be attracting attention, and it was likely that there would soon be more people than we wanted to see, clustering about us.

Yes, all right Jim, it's obvious what we did in the end.  We asked the alethiometer _Which Way Is Safe_ – at least, Lyra did – and it gave us a nice clear answer.  _Go North_.  That was easy; the Pole Star was clearly visible in front of us where we stood on the hill.  The direction was easy, anyway.  I wish we'd asked _How Far_ as well.  That's the trouble with oracles.  You not only have to be able to understand the answers they give, you also have to ask the right questions.  None of us were really in the sort of condition where we were thinking very sensibly.  That's our excuse.

So it was only after an uncomfortable hour of wading through soggy marshes, and being snagged by sharp-toothed brambles, and being swiped by low-hanging branches and – well afterwards Lyra said 'So that's what they mean by looking as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards!' – that we came across a cottage, sitting snugly in the fold of a low hill.  I knocked on the door, while the others waited by the garden gate, out of sight.  There was a short wait, then a light shone out briefly from a window by the front door, falling on my face.  Then a rattle of locks and latches and the door swung inwards.  Beside it stood the one person I was most glad to see.  Harry, from the _Maggie_, with his daemon peeping out of his top pocket and blinking at us.

'Peter!   Is there only you here?' he said, quietly.  I noticed then, as if for the first time, how unexpectedly well-spoken he was.  For a boatman, that is.

'No.  Lyra and Arthur are by the gate.'

'Thank heaven for that!'  I waved to the others where they stood hidden in the darkness and they came and joined Harry and me at the front door.

We gathered together in the kitchen.  'What's been going on?' Harry asked.

'You first,' answered Arthur. 'Tell us how the attack went.'  Harry looked resentful at that, I thought.

'It's simple enough.  For a start, there are three of us dead – Ashwald, Kinshen and Blabain.  We had to leave them where they lay.  The rest of us are mostly all right, though many of us have been hurt, more or less.

'We killed at least ten of them.  They were well-armed, but not so well trained, I think.  Poor Kinshen was killed by a guard who'd hidden in a cupboard on the first landing.  He jumped out as we were making for the attic stairs and stabbed him in the throat.  I shot the man where he stood.

'We found the children in the attic, after we'd broken down the doors.  There were five of them…'

'Intact?' asked Lyra in a sharp voice.

'Yes.  They were intact.  The ones in the house were well, but not, I'm afraid, the little boy we found in the garage.  Is that where you were?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you leave him all by himself?  I never thought you'd do a thing like that,' looking reproachfully at Arthur.

'We didn't mean to.  I'll tell you in a minute.  But what about the woman?'

'What woman?'

'Miss Morley.  She was there.  She killed the boy.'

'We don't know.  We never saw her.  What do you mean, _killed_?'

'He must be dead by now.  She severed his daemon from him.'

'Oh, it was her, was it?  But the equipment was damaged.  We saw the wreckage.  Did you do that?'

'Yes, we did.  With this.'  Arthur showed Harry the gun.

'Ugh!  That's a horrible thing.  But; to go back to where we were.  The boy wasn't killed.  He's still alive, after a fashion.  He's here, in the cottage.  Upstairs.'

I should explain, Jim, that Harry told us afterwards that the cottage was one of a number of safe houses that existed for the gyptian people to flee to in times of trouble.  They had been set up fifty years before, and were a great secret of the gyptians.  Not every gyptian knew of every house, obviously, in case he was caught and, as they used to say, put to the question by the official torturers of the Consistory Court of Discipline.

We followed Harry up the steep narrow stairs of the cottage to a small bedroom where the boy lay, stretched out rigidly in his bed and holding his daemon, which had taken the form of a sparrow, close to his heart.  Neither of them was moving.  They were both very pale; both very close to death, I could see.

'Arthur, do you think we could…' Lyra's eyes appealed to him.

'We doesn't know.  We hasn't tried…'

'Tried what?'  What did they mean?

'Peter, you've seen what Arthur can do with Dust.  He can't make it.  Well, he can, we all do, but although he is richly endowed with Dust, he can't make enough by himself to help this little boy...'

'His name is Davey,' interrupted Harry.  'His daemon's called Miranda.'

'Peter, Miss Morley stole this boy's Dust to power the vehicle we travelled to Will's and John's world in.  We'd never have got there – I wouldn't have been able to see Will again – if it weren't for Davey and his Dust.  It was taken from him by brutal force.

'Arthur, we've got to try to save him!  Restore his Dust to him, if we can.'

Arthur shook his head.

'We doesn't know.  We is tired.  We doesn't know if we can help him…'

Sal suddenly did something I've hardly ever seen a daemon do.  She took off from Arthur's shoulder, turned in the air and flew at his face, cutting a bloody swathe across his cheek with her beak.  We all heard what she said:  'Arthur, if you don't try to save this kid, I'm going to fly through the window, and down the garden and into the fields.  I'll fly and fly and fly until we're both dead!'

Arthur flinched.  Not with the pain of the cut, but at Sal's words.

'We'll need some help,' was all he said.

We all held hands around the bed.  Before Lyra had the chance to say anything I joined the circle.  I was going to do my bit and help.  If John could do it, so could I.  Our daemons huddled together around Davey's Miranda.  I realised with a shock that Harry had a _male_ daemon.  In any other circumstances I'd have run a mile rather than let myself come into contact with a same-sex human daemon pair.  Stars above; but they were _good_ people, _our_ people.  I'm ashamed now of how I felt then.

It was obvious from the start that this was going to be a terrible ordeal for Arthur.  He had used much of his strength only a few hours before – as we all had, except Harry (and we only found out later that he had been wounded in the assault on the house)  – but the greatest burden fell on him.

Slowly, so slowly, the air in the tiny bedroom filled with spinning flecks of golden Dust.  I was facing Lyra this time, and saw that she was the source of most of the conscious energy that was steadily building up in the atmosphere and flowing to and fro between the walls.  She looked unsteady and exhausted, and even as the power drained from me and I grew faint, I could see her swaying on her feet.

Arthur… Arthur stood with his eyes closed and Sal on his shoulder.  I could see his lips moving but heard no words.  Perhaps he was saying good-bye to her.  The boy still lay straight and rigid as a board on the narrow bed, unchanged.  Was this going to do any good?  Were we going to sacrifice ourselves for nothing?

The Dust condensed onto the daemons where they lay on Davey's chest, brightly gilding them.  Arthur was breathing quick shallow breaths and leaning against the wall behind him.  His old cloth cap had tilted over to a funny angle, I remember.  As we watched breathlessly the Dust was slowly absorbed by the daemons (Viola later described it to me as being "suffused with gladness") and they clustered ever closer together.  I was holding my breath and looking fearfully at Arthur.  All the colour had drained from his face, leaving him grey and old.  The effort, I could tell, was killing him.

Harry saw it first, I think, that first movement of Davey's.  The room was empty of visible Dust now and we were waiting to see if all our efforts had been in vain or not.

'Look!' he cried, and broke the circle, leaning over the bed and gathering up his daemon.  Viola scurried up my arm, and Pantaliamon ran down the length of the bed to Lyra.  The change in Davey was clear to see.  The colour had come back to his cheeks and his chest was moving up and down.  But, best of all, his daemon Miranda opened one eye, peered at us suspiciously, and…

And she changed.  Into cat-form.

I don't know which of us shouted loudest.  I know I was jumping up and down, thumping and bumping on the floor.

'Where am I?  This isn't the house?  What's going on?'  Davey was a boy who was always full of questions, we were to discover.

We were all talking at once and crashing and banging about, slapping each other, and laughing so loud, that for a moment we didn't miss Arthur.  But then there was a sudden desperate cry from Lyra.

'Arthur!'

Arthur had collapsed.  His knees had buckled and he had fallen to the floor.  We'd have noticed it sooner, if we hadn't been so busy celebrating Davey's return to life.  Lyra threw herself down to the gyptian's side.  'Arthur, Arthur,' she said softly.  'Everything's all right.  It's worked.  Davey is whole again.  You did it!'

But he made no reply.  As I leaned across the bed to see where he lay on the floor, Lyra kneeling by his side, I could see why.  Arthur was slumped against the side of the boy's bed, stiff and unmoving.  And of his daemon Sal there was nothing to be seen.


	15. In the cottage garden

Oh, no.  No, not Arthur.  Not him.

'She's hiding.  I bet she is.  Look under the bed.'

She wasn't under the bed.  Sarastus, who we all called Sal, wasn't anywhere.  She was gone, and Arthur with her.

Lyra stood up.  'Peter, take Davey and Miranda downstairs.  They're hungry, I expect.'

Her eyes were so full of pain I couldn't bear to look at them.  I took Davey's hand and helped him to get off the bed and onto his feet.  With his left arm wrapped around my shoulder and Miranda fussing by our feet and threatening at any moment to trip us up, we made our way carefully down the stairs and into the kitchen.

'Is everything all right?  Why is everybody looking so sad?  What's been happening?  Have you got anything to eat?  I'm starving!'

I wasn't in the mood to answer all his questions.  I lit a candle and sat Davey down by the scrubbed wooden table that stood in the middle of the kitchen floor while I hunted down a loaf of bread and some butter, cheese and milk.  He sat and played with his daemon (I think he was no more than six years old) while I made us tea and thick doorstop cheese sandwiches for us both.  I think that he realised that something was badly wrong, for he stopped talking after a while.  I wasn't listening to him anyway.  I was staring into the darkness outside the kitchen window, not bothering to wipe away the tears that were leaving salty white trails on my sooty black cheeks.

Arthur Shire.  I knew so little about him, except that he had been at Bolvangar, he owned two canal narrowboats ('Never, ever, call them _barges_!' he'd told me), and that the people who met him, once they saw past his grumpy manner and got to know him a little, became devoted to him.  Who were his parents?  Had he ever married – did he have a sweetheart anywhere?  How did he come to know Lyra?  I resolved that, one day, I would try to find out more about him and maybe write his story so that I, and the other people who'd never had the chance to meet him themselves, might be able to get some idea of what sort of man he really was.

Presently Harry and Lyra joined us in the kitchen.  I passed them a mug of sweet milky tea each and they sat at the table with Davey and me and drank in silence.  None of us wanted to talk very much.  I supposed that they had been laying Arthur out on the bed which Davey had so recently left.

Then there was nothing left for us to do but go to bed too.  Harry, Davey and I took the chairs and couches downstairs, covering ourselves with the blankets which we took from the press in the hall.  Lyra slept upstairs, in the second bedroom.  None of us slept very well, to be honest with you.  In the end, and it was as the beginnings of the light of dawn were starting to show on the ceiling, I drifted off to sleep for an hour or two.

Then I woke, and it was if I hadn't slept at all, I felt so tired and ill.  Harry and Davey were snoring gently in their chairs and I didn't want to disturb them, so I slipped quietly out of the room by a door I hadn't used before and found myself standing in the cottage's back garden, with the sun's rays shining across from left to right, making every drop of dew that rested on the grass of the lawn and leaves and flowers of the herbs and flowers sparkle like a watch-jewel.  The air was clean and fresh and the sun was already warm, with the promise of a beautiful early summer's day to come.  At any other time, I'd have stretched myself up to my full height, yawned, and started making plans for the day's business.  But not today…  You know how, when something awful has happened, or it's going to happen today – like having a tooth pulled out – when you wake up it takes a while before you realise how bad things are; and for that short while you're happy, especially if you and your daemon have been having _good_ dreams?  You do?  All I can say is that I envied you, as I stood with my back to the warm brick wall of the cottage, feeling the sun's heat beginning to soak into me, for I'd had no such respite when I woke.  It had all come back to me straight away; the wrenching despair I had felt when Sal had disappeared and I knew that my friend Arthur had died.  Died to save Davey's life – a boy that he had only just met.

I crouched down and gazed over the garden, which ran down to a rough stone wall, with a field of sheep beyond it.  The air was full of the sound of their bleating, mingled with birdsong from the trees round about.  As I watched, a flock of blackbirds flew overhead and settled on the roof behind me.  By my feet a robin was hopping, its head moving sharply from side to side as it searched for worms and insects to eat.

There was a black and white magpie there too.  Just one (_one for sorrow_, I thought).  I stretched out my left hand and it flew to me, wings flapping, and settled in the palm.  I put out my other hand, greatly daring, to stroke its feathers.  It turned its head to acknowledge the attention I was paying it, and in return I ran my hand up and down its back.  'I know you're not Sal,' I said to it, 'Just an ordinary magpie.  I know.'  But I wanted to keep it with me just the same.  For his sake.

I've said that the sun was slanting sideways across the garden, but falling onto me as well as I sat on my haunches next to the wall.  It was in my eyes somewhat, so I looked downward to the magpie where it sat, its own eyes blinking, in my hand.  So it was that when I looked up again, the sun half blinding me, I was confused by what I saw.

There was a figure – no, there were two figures, a man and a woman, wearing old-fashioned clothes, long and gauzy, walking together hand in hand on the dewy grass, outlined in hazy morning light, their faces hidden and turned towards one another, speaking hushed words whose meaning I could not quite catch, seeming almost to float across the lawn, so slow and stately were their movements.  I thought that they must be dream-people.  I wondered if I was still asleep and dreaming that I was dreaming.

I pinched myself hard – that's supposed to work if you think you're having a dream – but they were still there, standing close to each other and murmuring in each other's ears.  Perhaps they were ghosts?  The cottage was old, I could tell, and many folk must have lived and died within its walls over the centuries. Perhaps these two were the shades of a pair of lovers who had lived, and died, many years ago. But yet there was something about the ghost-people, if that's what they were, that pressed against my memory.  I was sure I knew them.  I put the magpie carefully down onto the ground and stood up, ready to climb over the flowerbeds of the cottage garden and greet these familiar strangers.  I wanted to speak to them and find out who they were.  But when I looked up again after letting go of the magpie, I saw that they had vanished.  I looked around, but they were nowhere to be seen.  I shook my head to clear it.

'Come inside now,' said Viola, and we turned away from the sunlit garden where I had seen my vision and stumbled back into the darkness of the cottage.  I thought that I would go into the kitchen and make breakfast for us all.  Life had to go on, I told myself.  We had to get back to Oxford somehow and find Davey's family, if he had one.

It was dark in the house after the brightness of the morning sun outside, so I felt my way to the kitchen, trying not to trip over Harold or Davey where they lay asleep.  My eyes were still not focussing properly when I pushed open the kitchen door, and at first I thought that the vision I had seen outside had followed me into the cottage.

There, sitting at the kitchen table, their hands resting on each other's, were Lyra and Arthur, Sal and Pantalaimon beside them.  Lyra gave me a look of purest delight.

'Hello Peter.  Would you like a cup of chai?  Oh!  You should see your face!'

I got little more from Arthur, then or at any other time, than, 'The bastards!  They sent us back, the rotten sods!  Just when we was getting used to the idea of being there.  We was going to enjoy it, we knows!'  Sal would wink at me, and say nothing.  Lyra never said much, either.  So it's a mystery to me; what happened there in the garden, and the rooms upstairs and, for there are many worlds and I only ever saw one other apart from our own, whatever world it was that Arthur went to, and Lyra followed, and persuaded the Authorities there to let her take him back with her to the worlds of life.  She must have had good friends there, or greater powers of persuasion than I ever knew.

Is there a World of the Dead?  Had Lyra really travelled there, in some way that I can only guess at, and brought Arthur back with her?  Sometimes I have dreams of such a place; a great wide dusty plain full of shadow-people, where the iron-grey skies hang overhead like an upside-down bowl.  Is that where she went that night, in search of him?

'We has work to do here, in this world,' were the only other words he ever said to me about it.

We ate and drank, and presently Davey joined us, rubbing his eyes while Miranda, butterfly-formed, hovered about his head, and asking what we were going to do today, and was there any orange squash he could drink and would Lyra please boil him some eggs.  There are times when I wish I was six years old too.

Lyra herself woke Harry, while we stayed in the kitchen.  I heard their voices in the other room, and then the sound of furniture falling over, and Harry burst through the door, his daemon in his wake, and embraced Arthur where he sat.  He was bawling like a baby, Harry was – I've never in my life seen anyone so badly upset by good news.

Jim, I'm going to annoy you here.  Yes, we got back to Oxford, but the details of our journey would bore you, or anyone else for that matter, to tears.  What's the point of going into long descriptions of how we avoided the patrols of Boreal police (for that is what they were, in all but name) who were combing the countryside to find the criminals who had attacked and destroyed the Boreal Foundation offices in Cropredy?  Lyra and I had to go further north to Brummagem before we dared to turn back and approach Oxford from another direction.  Harry had hidden the _Maggie_ in the canal basin in Banbury by the simple means of painting over her name (she was called the _Molly_ for the next few months until all the fuss died down).  Harry, Arthur and Davey stayed in the cottage, lying low.

When we got off the Aylesbury autobus at Gloucester Green, Lyra insisted on accompanying me to Shoe Lane and Master James' shop.  You see, I was in dead trouble.  I'd left there on Saturday morning, telling everyone that I was going to see my parents for the weekend.  I'd been expected back before curfew on Sunday night.  Instead, it was Wednesday afternoon, and where the hell had I been?  Master would have been completely within his rights to have given me a serious thrashing or even to have voided my indentures and sent me packing.

Lyra was marvellous.  She swept into the front shop, ignored the protests of the obnoxious Mr Cholmondley and cornered Master James at his own workbench.  She gave him a long story about lost tickets, and anbarograms, and broken-down trains, and emergency measures, and all so quickly that the poor man must have had the greatest trouble following her, let alone understanding what she said.  I don't suppose that even the famous detective Sherlock Holmes would have understood what she said, either.  ('I met him, once,' she told me afterwards.  'I wasn't much older than you at the time.  Such a nice man, though Doctor Watson was much easier to talk to.')

'Got away with it, then, didn't you?' said Carrie to me that evening.  'I don't know how you do it, I really don't.'

'It's not what you know,' I replied.

'It's _who_ you know!' Carrie finished, and we laughed.

There was no reason not to, so the next Saturday I set off for Jordan College as usual, for my alethiometry lesson with Lyra (or Professor Belacqua, as I had to get used to calling her again).

I am sure that, that time at least, I _was_ followed.


	16. I witness a fatal confrontation

I was all excited about seeing Professor Lyra again.  For a start, I wanted to show her the things that John Parry had given me.

They were _twonkies_, all right.  There were:

_The Collected Works of William Shakespeare_ (I've mentioned that already).

A coloured photogram of John and his family.  Apparently you couldn't see the daemons in the photogram, unless you could see them in real life.  I didn't understand that.  Neither did I understand how it was that you could see _into_ the picture, or look at it from different angles and see different things there.  (I tried looking from behind, but that didn't work).

A small black box, with silvery buttons on it.  John had tucked a note into the imitation leather case that the box came in.  It said 'Hope you like the tunes,' together with a set of instructions that told me how to work the box and a reminder to leave it out in the daylight for a few hours every now and then to charge up.  It seemed that it was a sort of miniature reproducing audiograph, and that John had filled it up with music.  I showed it to Arthur the next time we met.  He was very taken with some of the songs that were stored inside it (there were _thousands_ of them!), and he practiced singing and playing them himself on a little squeezebox he kept on board the _Maggie_.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A little brown book called _The Book Of The Wonders Of Urth And Sky_, full of retellings of ancient legends.  I recognised some of them (Ulysses, Robin Hood), but the others were new to me.  (Isn't that odd?  That John's world and mine should have the same stories?)

A Swiss Army penknife ('It's not very Subtle, but it _is_ sharp!' John's note said).

A delft statuette of a little green man with pointed ears.  John had hung a tag around his neck which read "My Hero!" and the name inscribed on the base was "Yodatm".  I've no idea who he was meant to be.  He looked like a gnome to me.

I wondered, though I never asked, what presents Will had given to Lyra.

I bounded, yes I did, up the Stair to Lyra's rooms.  The door was slightly ajar, as usual, so I knocked and walked straight in, as usual.  There was a cat on the landing, which was unusual.  Its presence should have alerted me that something was wrong.

'Come in, boy.  We've been expecting you.'  It wasn't Lyra who was sitting at her desk.  It was Miss Morley, perched on top of it like a black raven, and she was pointing a gun, a small pistol of a strangely _liquid_ shape at Lyra, who was sitting, upright and self-composed but looking frightened, in one of the fireside chairs.  'Perhaps you would like to sit next to your tutor,' and Miss Morley gestured with the gun.

Of course there would be more than one of these deadly weapons!  The other one was still in Arthur's hands, unless he'd destroyed it as he said he would.

I did as I was told, knowing that I didn't have much choice.  Even if I made a dash for the staircase, Miss Morley could still kill Lyra whenever she felt like it.  It was more than likely too that there were other agents of the Boreal Foundation nearby.  I cursed myself for my stupidity in carrying on with my normal everyday life as if nothing had happened (but, looking back, what else could I have done?)

'Thank you.  You will find that prompt obedience is the best possible response you can make to my directions.

'Please remember to keep your filthy animals in plain sight.  I shall have no hesitation in killing them if they make any untoward movements.  I understand that would have unpleasant repercussions for you, too.'  Miss Morley shrugged her shoulders regretfully.

I looked at Lyra.  She smiled ruefully back to me and shook her head.  I clasped Viola in my hands.

'Is the third member of your dirty little conspiracy planning to join us this afternoon?'

'No.' Lyra kept her answer short, giving as little away as possible.

'No?  Such a shame.  I should have liked to have had the chance of settling our differences.  Never mind.  I'm sure there will be another opportunity for us to have a little chat.  I'm looking forward to continuing with his lesson in good manners.

Lyra interrupted her.  'Why don't you let Peter go?  He's only a boy!  You know he's no threat to you.'

'Oh, but I need to teach him a lesson too.  He caused me significant discomfort last Sunday evening with his violent and quite unwarranted attack.  I'm still considering what form of punishment would fit his particular crime.  Where I live, we come down pretty hard on vicious young thugs like him.'

_Where I live_.  I grinned.  I'd had an idea.

'You're stuck here, aren't you?  The car's wrecked!  You can't go home!'

'Oh, you know about all that, then, do you?'

'Yes, you ugly old trollop.  You're stuck here, bitch, and you're going to effing die here!'  _Would it work?_

'Oh, Peter, Peter.  You don't really think I'm going to come over and smack your naughty bottom just because you've called me some rude names, do you?  And then you might overpower me?  Do I look as if I was born yesterday?'

Oh well, so much for my good idea.  'No.  You look like you were born a very long time ago.'

Miss Morley shook her head.

'You're boring me. Please don't speak again unless I tell you to.  Now, Professor Belacqua.  As I was saying before your nasty little guttersnipe burst in on us in that rude manner, I have been directed by Lady Boreal to conduct certain – negotiations – with you.'

'If my sister wishes to speak to me, she is welcome to come here herself.  My door is always open, as you discovered this afternoon.

'I have heard of you before, Miss Morley.  I know what sort of person you are.  If you had been born in this world, you would have been born dead, without a daemon.  You have no natural feelings, no conscience, no sense of moral truth.  You are not a complete person and you have my most profound sympathy.  If it were possible for me to kill you now, I would do so and have no regrets; it would be a mercy to you.  It would be more like getting rid of a of a noxious object – a turd – than killing a real human being.'

'How elegantly you express your disdain for me, Professor.  However, as you have already pointed out, you are not able to kill me, whereas I,' and the muzzle of the gun twitched slightly, 'could dispose of you right now with just the slightest movement of my index finger.

'Nevertheless, you mentioned _truth_, and it is truth that most concerns my superiors at this time.  If you were to agree to our proposal it would go some way towards expiating the crimes you committed last Sunday.  You have something that we would like to buy from you.'

'What's that?  Another car?'

'I told you to keep quiet, little boy.  The car is of no concern to me.  The Boreal Foundation has quite enough resources to buy another vehicle and install another IID into it.  It was, after all, originally built here, not in the other world.  We have all the information we need to construct another one.'

'You may find it difficult to find more children to steal the Dust it needs.  People are on their guard now.   They have remembered what the Gobblers were.'

'Children!  Horrible little worthless creatures, smelly and disgusting.  There are always plenty of spare children, my dear Professor Belacqua.  For some reason, people can't stop making them, I'm told.  Dirty rutting animals!'

Lyra shook her head sadly.  'Go on, then, Miss Morley.  Tell me what Elizabeth told you to say.'

'Very well.  It is this.  You have an oracular device, the so-called alethiometer, and considerable skill in its use.  I understand that it requires many years of study before the user can obtain reliable results from it.

'You must believe me when I say that we could, at any time over the past twenty or thirty years, have taken this alethiometer from you and put it to our own exclusive use.'

'I do, although the last person who tried to steal it from me was killed by a witch.'

'How very appropriate!  Nevertheless, I am sure that so intelligent a person as yourself will understand what it is that we are offering to you.  I will spell it out, all the same.  It is so unfortunate when there are misunderstandings at the very beginning of a business relationship; things can go sour later on.

'It is this: in return for us allowing you to continue to live and enjoy all the privileges you are entitled to as a professor of Jordan College, you will, from time to time and at our direction, promptly furnish your skills with the alethiometer to us, to the benefit of the Boreal Foundation.   This agreement is to remain binding on you until you die, or until we have no further use for you.'

'And if I do not agree to be so bound?'

'Then we will take the alethiometer from you and use it ourselves.'

'It would be of no use to you.  You cannot read it.'

'We can learn to read it.  We will take the instrument and the Books of Reading and apply ourselves to their study until we have mastered them.  Perhaps this boy, your student – or is he your plaything – would like to assist us?'

'Eff off!'

'You _are_ coarse, aren't you?  Never mind.

'So, Professor.  Your answer, please.'

Lyra paused.  I wondered; was she going to give in to Miss Morley's demands?  It seemed very unlikely, but if she did reject the woman's offer, such as it was, what would happen to us?  For a moment I found myself thinking: _Say yes.  You can always go back on it later_.  I should have known Lyra better than that.  When it came to the truth she never ever compromised.

'Here is my answer.  Tell your mistress that I will never surrender the alethiometer to her, or to her corrupt Foundation.  Nor will I put myself at her service, now or at any time in the future.  While you are speaking to her, remind her that, although the Boreal Foundation may, in its overweening pride, consider itself to be all-powerful, there are other powers in this world, and that Jordan College is not the least of them.

'Lastly, tell her this: I am not afraid to die.  I have met my Death, and he is my friend.  I have walked in the Land of the Dead, and I have many good friends there as well.

'Kill me if you must.  Spare this boy, if you can find it in you to do so, for he is innocent.'

'It would be no bad thing if I were to kill him now,' and the gun pointed directly at my heart. 'It would be a useful object lesson to you that we mean what we say.'

Suddenly, I had had enough.  She was treating me, not as a person, but as a tool, or an expendable resource, to be used and discarded as required, like Davey, and the other children she had sacrificed on the gallows of the intercisor. How did she dare do this!  I was a person too, at least as good as her.

I leapt to my feet and charged at Miss Morley, determined to sell my life to save Lyra.  I think – actually I had no time to think – but I think my intentions must have been to knock her sideways, as I had before in the garage in Cropredy.  Perhaps I would be able to take the gun from her, or if not, and she killed me, my dead body would knock into her and Lyra would be able to rise from her seat and reach her in time to disarm her herself.  I hoped that she would kill Miss Morley for me if that happened.

The woman was not far away from me where she sat on Lyra's desk – three or four yards at the most – but her finger was already on the trigger and her gun was already pointing towards me.  She had plenty of time to react.  She fired the gun, and with a loud hissing sound a blazing lance of violet brilliance raged through the air at my chest.  Perhaps Lyra screamed; I didn't hear it.

Suddenly the room, which had contained nobody else but Lyra, Miss Morley, and me, was crowded with people.  They stood, tall and short, slender and stocky, solid and yet translucent too.  Their faces were turned from me, or hidden under hoods or helmets so that I could not make them out.  A few of them were dressed in fine armour, gleaming with silver and gold, others in leather coats, or overalls of black.  Some were men, some women, but it was hard to tell them apart by their clothes, for none of them followed any style that I could recognise, nor were they made of any fabric that was familiar to me.

They filled the room, as I have said, so that one of them, shining in bright armour, came between Miss Morley, and her lethal beam, and myself.  Another of the strange folk threw himself at me, pushing my body to the floor, safe from the energies that were unleashed above me.

For the destructive pencil of light, as it struck the armoured man, _bounced_.  Reflected from the mirrored surface of his breastplate, the beam split in two, each separate ray shooting out from him and striking another of his armed fellows where it was again reflected directly back to its source.  Miss Morley herself.

The twin torrents of destructive radiation fanned out into blades of furious energy and, as they passed across Miss Morley's body, they cut swathes of burning flesh from it, moving forwards and backwards, glaring brighter as they vaporised bone, raising a detestable stench of burnt meat as they sliced through her skin, her hair flashing into a torch of living flame around her head, her eyes turning all-over white and oily black smoke pouring from her mouth.

The flensing knives of energy were cutting the woman to pieces before my eyes.  I cannot believe that this was accidental.  In some way, the armoured figures were moving, focusing the pistol's ravening beam on her.

She screamed and howled and her ruined body twisted and writhed in what must have been unbearable pain as it fell headlong onto the carpet.  I believe that her brains were already boiling inside her head and that her cries of agony were only reflexes, or the last breaths being driven from her lungs past her tortured vocal cords.

At last there was silence, and nothing remained of Miss Morley but a blackened mass, still smouldering, stretched out across the carpet.  I was retching; not just with the horror of her death, but also with the odour of charred human flesh.  I think I passed out.

When I came to, there was nothing.  Nothing but Lyra's concerned face above mine and her hands under my shoulders, gently lifting me into a sitting position against the wall.  'Peter,' she asked, 'what's wrong?'

I looked around the study.  The strange people were gone.  The air was clear and fresh and Miss Morley's incinerated body had disappeared.  Nothing remained, except the faint gagging smell of burning, lingering in my nostrils.

'Miss Morley?  Where is she?'  I must have struggled in Lyra's arms.

'It's all right Peter.  Don't worry.  It's been hard on you, I know, this past week.  I should have expected it to have had some effect on you.  I didn't expect you to faint on me, though!'

Lyra's words were soothing, but I was still confused.  What had happened to our enemy, and my unexpected helpers?

'Miss Morley?'  I asked again.

'Don't you remember?  I told you.  She went back into the house after the gyptians fired it while we were in… in the other world.  She never came out – she was burned to death in there, or crushed when the roof fell in.'

'She died last Sunday?  She can't have!  She was here, just now!'

'No, no, she can't have been.  I told you, Peter.  She died last week.'  Lyra looked worried again.  'Come on.  Come over here and sit here next to me, by the fireplace.  We won't do any exercises today.'

We sat together, whiling away the time, drinking chai and eating digestive biscuits.  Despite my puzzlement at what had happened – or had it – I found myself enjoying our friendship more that at any time before.

After an hour, I left, promising to return the following week to continue my studies.  Still confused, but not unhappy, I gave a cheery goodbye to the porter as I passed through the entrance of Jordan College and he waved back to me.  I didn't see Jane Phipps where she was standing in the street outside, and I bumped into her and nearly knocked her over.

'Sorry Jane!'

'That's all right, Peter.'

'What are you doing here?'

'I was just… looking around.'

To make up for my clumsiness I bought Jane kaffee and chocolate cake in a nearby teashop.  Later, as it was a nice sunny afternoon, we went for a stroll along the banks of the Cherwell, and it was there that she first kissed me.


	17. The Zanzibar Fallacy

'So it was _her_!'

'Yes, Jim.  Jane never let on how long she'd been following me.'

We were sitting in the snug of the Talbot Inn, just last Thursday lunchtime.

'All right.  Now let's move on to the rest of the story.'

'Can't.'

'What do you mean, "Can't"?'

'I mean I can't.  There is no rest of the story.  That's it.'

'That's it?  You're joking!  You can't just stop there.  What happened next?'

'Nothing happened next.'

'No such thing as nothing, my master says.'

'Oh, well, if you put it that way.  I still work for Master James, I still take lessons with Professor Belacqua on Saturday afternoons, and I'm taking Jane to the Palais tonight.  That's it.  That's the end of my story.'

'It's pretty feeble.'

'I'm sorry, but there it is.  It's _my_ story, not something out of a penny-blood.  It's not something I made up.'

'Can't you add a few things to, er, spice it up?  Didn't you and the Professor make love, or anything like that?  Don't tell me you didn't want to!'

'Yes, of course I did.  But after I saw her and Will together that all sort of faded away.'

'Bit like your story, then.  I mean, it all fizzles out, doesn't it?  It doesn't hold together at all.  What about all those magic people who kept turning up and saving your bacon?  How do you explain them?'

'I can't.'

'Typical!  I suppose the couple you saw in the cottage garden were Arthur and Lyra.'

'I thought so, too.  I thought they must have gone around the front of the house and into the kitchen, while I blundered around the back.   I'm not so sure, though.  There wasn't enough time.'

'So who were they?  And what about the other ones in the Professor's study?  The blokes in the armour and all.  Where did they come from?  Another one of your mystical worlds, like the one where Will and John and Julie lived?'

'It was _Judy_.  No, I don't think they came from there.  I've been doing some thinking…'

'_You_; thinking? Not very likely!'

'Cheerio then, Jim. I'm off.'

'No.  All right.  Sorry.  Sit down.  Go on.'

'You remember the experimental theologian in John's world?  Aunt Mary?'

'Sort of.'

'It was during that long afternoon on the Clifton Downs in Bristol.  She and Arthur and me were talking and I asked her about the worlds, and how it came about that there were all these different ones.

'"It's all to do with probability and event forks," she said.  "Every time you do something, the world splits into at least two new worlds, maybe more than two, depending upon the outcomes of what you did.  Like if you toss a coin.  Have you got one on you?  We don't have coins here any more."'

'No coins?' Jim asked.

'No coins.  Phones.  I told you.  So I found a tanner in my pocket and tossed it.  It came down ports.'

'"There you are," Mary said.  "We're living in the world where the coin came down tails, not heads," (I didn't correct her).  "That's one tine of the event fork.  There's another one where it came down heads.  And another one where it landed on its edge."

'That's not very likely!

'"No, it's not.  Such very improbable worlds are inherently unstable – they don't persist; they decay like a radioactive element does.  Or, to put it another way, the coin doesn't stay balanced on its edge for long; it tips over so it's showing heads or tails and is stable once more.  That's a good thing, otherwise there would be an infinite number of worlds, instead of the relatively few stable ones which actually exist."

'What was she on about?'

'I don't know, Jim.  I told you I never understood a fraction of what she said.  It got me thinking, though, about what happened.  You see, suppose that I crossed from one world to another and never knew it?  Like, there was one world where Arthur died saving Davey and another where he didn't and I started off in one and ended up in the other, so I'd been in both at the same time.  That bothers me, though.'

'I can see that.'

'No, look.  If something happened and there was this event fork that Mary talked about, then there should have been two of me after the event.  One where Arthur died, and one where he didn't.  But if I was the Peter who lived in the world where Arthur lived, how could I remember him dying?  And if I was the Peter who should have lived in the world where Arthur died, what happened to me?  What I mean is that I'm in both worlds at the same time, which ought to be impossible.  I'm worried, too, about the other me.  Where is he?  Is he alive?  If I've got his memories, does that mean I've killed him?

'The same sort of thing happened in Lyra's study, only it's worse.  There must be a me who was killed by Miss Morley.  I don't remember anything about him, so he must be safely dead.  But what about the Miss Morleys?  They died in at least two different ways, but I can only remember the wrong one!

'And the mysterious people?'

'Jim; I don't know.  I don't know how it was that I saw them, or why they saved me from Miss Morley.  I don't think they were anything to do with Mary's worlds and her event forks and all that.  I think they came from somewhere else altogether.'

'Where?'

'I can only guess.  You'll say that this is just because I work with clocks, and that I'm too dim to think of anything else, but I don't think they came out of a where-place at all, but a when-place.  I think they came out of time.'

Which reminds me…

The Zanzibar Fallacy 

There was once an explorer who came to the tropical island of Zanzibar.  Now, it happens that the island of Zanzibar is much longer than it is wide, so that the opposite ends of the island are separated by many miles of hilly jungle country.

This traveller was a naval man by profession, and he had not been long on the island before he was told of a retired naval officer, a countryman of his, who lived at the extreme western end of the island, in a wooden house built high up on the cliffs overlooking the ocean.

The explorer thought that he would like to visit his fellow expatriate, so he journeyed to the man's house, taking but one porter with him, for he preferred to travel light and, anyway, was not an excessively wealthy man.  The journey took two days, or maybe it was three, but apart from the expected privations of crossing jungle terrain there was nothing remarkable about his trip.  Nothing, that is, except that at noon each day he heard the sound of a naval gun, booming out from beyond the hills to the west and scattering the brightly-coloured tropical birds about his head.

When he reached the ex-officer's house he was made very welcome.  All morning they sat together on the veranda overlooking the sea, drank chukka pegs, and talked of home and their lives in the navy.  As the time approached midday, the owner asked to be excused.  He walked to the far end of the veranda, where there was a quarter-pound cannon, and, consulting his watch, fired a single shot at precisely twelve o'clock.

'I do that every day,' he said to the traveller, who understood perfectly his host's desire to observe naval tradition.  'Tell me,' he asked him.  'How do you ensure that you always fire your gun at exactly midday?  Do you take sightings?'

'No need,' he other replied.  I kept the ship's chronometer from the old _Arethusa_ and I set my own watch to it every morning.'

'Ah,' said the first. 'But how do you know that the chronometer is correct?'

'That is simple.  At the other end of the island there is a clockmaker of great renown who keeps all his timepieces in perfect order.  Twice a year I send my chronometer to him and he regulates it for me.'

The traveller spent several enjoyable days at the naval officer's house and they became great friends.  'Give my regards to Mister Jones the clockmaker, won't you?' the old seaman said as they parted.  'I will,' the explorer replied, and they shook hands warmly.

Two weeks later, the traveller reached the far eastern end of Zanzibar and there, in a small town nestling under a ridge of green trees and grey rocks, he found Mr Jones' shop.  It was a shop such as you may find anywhere there are clocks and watches to be made or mended  – dim and cool, filled with the soft sounds of ticking and chiming.  Our explorer introduced himself to the clockmaker and, noticing how well all the watches and clocks in his shop were synchronised, asked him how he made sure that they were all keeping the right time.

'That is simple,' the clockmaker responded.  'At the other end of the island there is a retired naval officer who, every day at twelve o'clock precisely, fires a gun.  I set all my clocks by him.'

Thank you, Viola.  You'd thought I'd forgotten about it, hadn't you?


	18. Afterword and Author's Notes

**__**

Acknowledgements

Before anything else, I must say thank you to Jopari for his help with this story and especially for lending me that miserable old grump Arthur Shire and Sarastus (Oh, and Harry too). One or two minor plot points wouldn't have worked without them…

This story fits chronologically between Jopari's stories _An Ever-Rolling Stream_ and _His Day's Work_. If you want to learn Harry's surname, and the name of his daemon, you'll have to read Jopari's _Arthur and Maggie_. How did Arthur Shire and Lyra Belacqua come to know each other? You'll have to ask Jopari – I don't know the answer to that one.

Fans of the much-missed Douglas Adams will know what the IID was. Peter never found out. In fact, he never even thought about it.

I did not invent the Zanzibar Fallacy myself, but I'm not sure who did. Can anybody help me?

Of course, all Philip Pullman's and Jopari's characters and situations belong to them. Everyone and everything else is mine and copyright © Ceres Wunderkind 2002.

**__**

Odd Points

In case you're wondering how it was that Peter had heard of a play about two people called Romulo and Gianetta but nevertheless was unfamiliar with the works of William Shakespeare, I'll remind you that WS did not himself invent the story of Romeo and Juliet, but adapted many existing texts, including Arthur Brooke's poem _The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562)_. What will happen when Peter (or, more likely, Jim) publishes the _Collected Works_ that John Parry gave him? That'll shake up the hidebound Scholars of Jordan College!

Why was Peter disturbed by Harry's same-sex daemon when the gyptians and the people of Jordan College weren't worried about it? I'd suggest that Brytish society is just as heterogeneous as ours, and that different social groups have different attitudes. A ready tolerance of difference is more likely to exist in the liberal atmosphere of an Oxford college, where eccentricity is the norm, or among the gyptians, who are outsiders. Jopari says that Harry was bullied at his school, to the extent that he was forced to run away.

Why bring Arthur back from the dead? There are two answers to that – choose the one you prefer. The first is the mechanistic one; that I borrowed him from Jopari and promised to hand him back in good condition. He's needed, you see, for the story _His Day's Work_. The second is that, as he said, death was not ready for him.

You've probably realised that Will's world is running on what's called a "hydrogen economy". Now that electricity is effectively free (due to a paradigm shift in physics resulting from the Subtle Knife's destruction making hot-fusion reactors safe, cheap and easy to run), fossil fuel consumption has effectively fallen to zero. Oil is only used for lubrication and as a raw material for plastics, not as a fuel. Hydrocarbon pollution has been drastically reduced and CO2 emissions have fallen. Many of the scarcity-driven causes of war have disappeared.

So why isn't everybody happy?

What a shame there was no room for the Ci'gazzeans in this story! I'd love to find out how Giovanni, Giancarlo and Guilietta Bellini have been getting on. With Mr Greaves sliced in half and Miss Morley reduced to ashes there aren't many of the bad guys left. Hooray for our side! There's still the Chief Gobbler, though. She's been keeping out of sight all this time…

Thank you for reading this far. The story continues in _The Queen of the Night_. Due to a regrettable change in policy by FF.NET which has banned NC-17 material, this story is no longer available here. Instead, you can find it on my own site which is at www.cereswunderkind.net, or you can follow the link on my bio page. Sorry about the inconvenience which is due to factors beyond my control. I should warn you that I did not without justification rate _TQotN_ so highly.

Ceres Wunderkind, June 2002


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